Zombie cupcakes

No, don’t worry, all of those cupcakes that you have eaten aren’t coming back to get you and eat your brains.
Instead, I have found a really great book called A Zombie Ate My Cupcake by Lily Vanilli, that I HAD to tell you about.

A Zombie Ate My Cupcake is a great book about guess what – Cupcakes. But whereas I have had a go at spooky cupcakes before (see Halloweenerrific’s cupcakes – which are delicious by the way) Lily Vanilli takes them to a whole new level with cakes that look amazingly horrible and deliciously disgusting.

Lily has been handmaking bespoke cakes for years and has lots of celebrities on her list of clients. And not only do these cakes look good, but they also taste good too. She only uses quality ingredients.

The book is great fun with lots of background setting for this most interesting culinary experience. Apparently the recipes were inspired by the world’s first celebrity chef, Alexis Soyer, who back in 1800 used all sorts of nasty looking ingredients to wow his customers.

What’s inside

There are loads of different cupcakes to try. And the ingredients are very thorough, so even the inexperienced cake maker should be able to come up with something resembling the photos in the book. Look, I had a go with my daughter and we (sort of) managed to make some ‘Day of the Dead Skulls’ cakes.

There really are a lot of excellent recipes in here. Some of my favourites being the ‘Bleeding Hearts’ cupcake, which looks incredibly like a real human heart;’Blood-stained brains’ (shown in picture above) which kind of looks like the top of someone’s head with the top taken off; ‘Undead Gingerbread’ which is a selection of cupcakes with gingerbread gravestones in; and perhaps the least spooky, but most impressive looking ‘Zombie Snacks’ which are cupcakes that look remarkably like hamburgers.

Not just cupcakes

There are also some other non-cake treats such as the ‘Marzipan Beetles’ and the ‘Morbid Meringue Bones’ which will definitely be making an appearance at our Halloween gathering this year – delicious and great looking.

Too good to be true?

There are however one or two problems with this book and its ideas. First off, you’re going to be too spoilt for choice. There are so many ideas, it’s hard to choose which one to try. Second, if you want the cakes to look good you’re going to need practice. You saw my attemp earlier in this post? Enough said.
Finally, some of the ingredients are kind of specialised, such as ‘luster dust’ so you’ll have to be prepared to pay out a bit to be able to make your cakes look anywhere near as good as they do in the book.
However, practice isn’t as bad thing when you get to eat the ‘test subjects’. Plus, you don’t have to follow the recipes completely. No doubt they could just be used for inspiration.

Where to find it

Anyway, if you’re wanting cakes this Halloween, be sure to check this book out! You can find it for around £5 with free delivery at Play.com (UK), or from Amazon in the UK, Europe and US – as far as I know.

No doubt about it, A Zombie Ate My Cupcake is the best Halloween cake book around!