Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!

Submitter's Comments:
Greetings and salutations! I can't remember exactly how i stumbled upon the awesomeness that is Threadcakes, but stumble upon it i did, and considering how indecisive i usually am, i decided pretty darn quickly that i was going to enter.
However, a selection of hundreds of different amazing designs to choose from both delighted and scared this indecisive person on equal measure and after procrastinating over which design to pick for 3 days, i finally opted for this one purely because i thought 'zombie and the brain' would be fun to do.

I baked the cake, which is plain vanilla sponge, on a Tuesday night. It measures roughly 30cm across and took an 9 egg mix.

I then spent most of Wednesday and Thursday decorating, had a break Friday due to the annoyance of having to go to my real job for the day, and then picked it up again on the Saturday, finishing around 3.30 in the afternoon. A guesstamation would be probably around 30 hours spent decorating it, give or take (and that doesn't include me being reaaalllly dumb and using salted butter for the butter icing by mistake and having to throw that batch away and go into town to buy some UN-SALTED butter. Oh my, it tasted as gross as a zombie looks!)

I put a ring of fondant icing around the edge of the cake and flipped it to give me a flat top to work on, and dirty iced it (with the new improved yummy butter icing).
After covering the cake with coloured fondant, i did the little tiles around the edge first and then used marzipan to work on the zombie, shaping her face, neck and shoulders. I then covered sections of her with rolled out fondant and used my fingers to work in the details using the base i had made out of marzipan underneath as a guide.

At this point i did wonder if i should blow up the original image to scale and print it off to use as a template to make sure everything is where it should be, but decided to go freehand with it and do it by eye instead. By doing it by eye, it does mean that there are some scale issues and it isn't as close to the original illustration as it could be, but i felt this would be more of a challenge for me.

I used dust colours to paint the detail on to Lady Zombie, a mixture of dry dust and using vodka to make a paint for some of the wrinkles.
The tiles in the background were pretty fiddly and i had a couple of goes using different techniques for the hair clasp with the brain pattern on it. In the end i decided i would use a template for this one and made a stencil which i then used dust to get the design onto a piece of cut gum paste. I used gum paste for the hair band and the fork, everything else is fondant.

I would say my biggest headache with this cake was the hair. You will probably notice that it changes around half way through the photos. I wasn't happy with it by the end of Thursday and i had Friday at work to decide i was going to redo it Saturday.
I love the patterns in the hair and used the template i had printed off for the hair clasp, to help guide the fondant into a more recognisable pattern. To be honest, i'm not sure how successful this new attempt was, but i would kick myself if i didn't even try to make it better.

The last details to put on was the fork and the blood. The fork represents the only non edible element on there, i used a tooth pick stuck in the cake to rest the fork on otherwise the height from the top of the brain to the cake was too much and the fork would have fallen back.

And there we have it, my first zombie cake, i loved making it, it was stressful and enjoyable and frustrating and challenging all at the same time. I like to think of it like the Lord of the Rings films, not a page for page copy but has the spirit and feeling and intent of the original source material. (not that i'm comparing my cake to a multi million dollar movie franchise! Good grief, zombies AND LOTR, i am such a fan girl geek!)

Anyways, thanks for having this competition and thanks for looking at my cake and reading my ramblings, and farewell for now. (i may or may not be contemplating a 3D entry, i think i'm hooked!)

PS. I forgot to mention how yummy it tasted and it was really fun hacking into her. Nuts, i should have made it blood red sponge cake! Doh!