One Last Nightmare Before Christmas

 As Baketober draws to a close, I knew I needed to create one last Nightmare Before Christmas, so to speak.You could argue literally everything about this year has been one big fat nightmare before Christmas, so my final spooky bake is firing on all cylinders, really...if you've got it, haunt it, I say. Many years ago when I first got into baking, I was commissioned to make a Jack Skellington birthday cake for a friend. To this day, it remains my most popular Pinterest creation, and every October, the repins go off the charts. I have come a long, long way since I made that cake in 2014, so I wanted to give old Jack an even more handsome cake countenance...

He is a witch's fondest dream, after all.

Quick-witted, legs-for-days, tune-carrying Jack Skellington with that wicked crooked smile always has been one of my favorite leading men, what can I say. My newest tribute to the Pumpkin King comes in the form of an orange creamsicle cake, and it is to die for...you could say I'm gonna be goblin up this cake with reckless abandon. Compared to Oogie Boogie's rich black velvet cake tribute, this cake is extremely light and almost summery...Jack would allow it since it means exploring other holidays like 4th of July World (pretty sure that wasn't a door in the movie, but you get my point). It has extremely refreshing bursts of orange flavor in an airy sponge cake with a tangy and sweet cream cheese frosting. It most definitely tastes exactly like an orange creamsicle in cake form, so mission accomplished, and at only 229 calories a slice (10 slices total), bone appetit, everyone, it's completely guilt free.

Orange you glad to see such easy ingredients?

Seriously, this is a very quick and easy cake recipe, I promise. All you need to make the cake layers are:

• 1 box sugar free yellow cake mix
• 3 egg whites
• 3/4 cup fresh-squeezed orange juice (I needed 2 large oranges)
• 1/2 cup of fat free or 2% skim milk (I use Fairlife fat free)
• 1/2 cup of unsweetened applesauce
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1-2 teaspoons orange extract (I used 2, and I love that there's no mistaking this is an orange-flavored cake)
• 1 box of sugar free orange Jell-o (they come in tiny boxes, but you really only need 1)

Preheat your oven to 325 and grease 3 6-inch round pans with cooking spray and bake even strips. Dump all your ingredients into a stand mixing bowl, blending on low for 30 seconds, then bump the speed up to medium-high for 2 minutes. Thanks to the orange Jell-o, you don't need to add any food coloring to make this cake pop with orange coloring. 

Now, evenly pour your batter between all 3 pans.

Bake at 325 for 25-28 minutes, until a toothpick comes out of each cake round clean. Leave your cakes in the pan on top of a cooling rack for 10 minutes so they're easier to handle. Then, with the help of some tea towels, flip each round out of the pan and leave on the cooling racks to finish cooling completely. I placed mine into the fridge to speed this process up. If you don't have bake even strips, you will probably need to level your cakes once they're fully cooled.

Orange like a Pumpkin King should be!

Now, there are a few things to accomplish while those cakes cool:

1. Make chocolate skulls.
2. Cut out Jack Skellington's face.
3. Mix and try not to eat all the orange cream cheese frosting.

I will use these skull molds for any and all reasons I can come up with.

I have a detailed account of how to make these skulls in this blog post from last Halloween. Head there to get the specifics!

And say hello to my little friends.

I believe I made 20 of these skulls for Jack's "crown," and only used 14. I made these last week and kept them in a single layer in a Tupperware at room temp. I actually hate the way chocolate melts taste, so I don't ever eat these (they also add 13 calories a pop to the calorie count above), but damned if I don't love how absolutely creepy they look.

Once again, I did not cut off a finger, X-acto knife win!

Much like Oogie, I used an X-acto knife and a template on Parchment paper to create Jack's face. I found this pumpkin carving template online, resized it to fit my cake (I used Canva to resize it, but you could copy and paste into Word or Paint and scale the size up or down as needed), and with the help of my X-acto knife and a cutting mat, I cut out what was needed:

I can't say no to a devilish smile.

I actually did this twice, because Jack's face is on two sides of my cake, so no matter what angle he's sitting at in my fridge, he's smiling at me every time I open it. I'm almost as love-struck as Sally.

Ah black cocoa, we meet again.

No, this isn't a black cocoa cream cheese frosting for the third blog in a row. Sort of...part of the frosting that needed to be black is, but the vast majority of the frosting is a plain orange cream cheese icing. To make, you need:

• 1/2 cup low fat butter 
• 8 ounces reduced fat cream cheese
• 1 tsp orange extract
• 1 tsp vanilla extract (optional: omit this and use 2 tsp orange extract if you want more orange flavor)
• 4 cups of Lakanto powdered monkfruit sweetener
• 3 tsp of skim milk, divided
• 1 TBS black cocoa
• Orange and black gel dyes
• Orange Spooky Sprinkles 
• 3 piping bags
• 1M or 2D piping tip

Start by mixing the butter and cream cheese on medium high for 2-3 minutes, until light and fluffy. Add in 2 cups of Lakanto, orange and vanilla extracts, and blend on low until fully mixed. Then add in the remaining 2 cups of Lakanto and 2 tsp of milk. Blend fully, and then take a heaping amount of frosting (I used 10 ounces), and set it aside in a medium bowl. Once this is done, add several dollops of orange gel dye to the frosting left in the stand mixer bowl. Mix well, and turn your attention back to the reserved frosting. Add the black cocoa, final teaspoon of milk, and some black gel dye to this, mixing by hand. Now, we're ready to assemble!

It smelled like a citrus factory at this point.

Put your first layer of cake face down on a cake board. Add a decent layer of frosting to the top of it smooth out, and repeat with the next layer. Add the final layer on top, then cover the cake completely in orange cream cheese frosting. Be sure to reserve some orange frosting for the swirls on top. I ended up with a bunch of leftover frosting (both orange and black), and I have it in Ziplocks in the freezer for the next time I just need to eat frosting and nothing else (I refuse to believe I'm the only person who does this).

EVERYTHING. GETS. SPRINKLES.

Once you've smoothed out the sides and top of the cake, very carefully pour the orange sprinkles on top, using light pressure with your fingers to get it to stick in place. This is a crusting frosting, so you can use the paper towl trick to smooth out imperfections once you've chilled your cake for 30 minutes.

I'm ahead of the carve here...

...you will need to chill it for 30 minutes anyway to help your black frosting layer from mushing into the orange completely. Once my 30 minutes was up, I smoothed out a few areas and then placed my templates on each side of the cake. I used a paintbrush and some small palette knives to make sure no edges of the template were sticking up. This will keep frosting from leaking through to the rest of the cake, so do not skip this step. I got sidetracked at some point (it was by food), so I put my cake back in the fridge for 15 minutes and came back to it to do my painting:

I am a messy artiste.

With the cake chilled, now you can use a small angled spatula or small palette knives to brush the black frosting over the template. You will want to use a bench scraper or the side of the angled spatula to smooth out this layer of frosting so it is evenly distributed and the layering isn't wonky.

A scare is born...

Once you've evened out the black frosting, carefully peel away your template, revealing the one and only Jack Skellington. You could call it a day, but I'm extra, so I wanted to give him a skull crown, too.

This is Halloween, everybody make a scene!

I placed my remaining orange frosting in one piping bag and the black in another. Then in a larger piping bag fitted with a 1M tip, in both of these bags went. I piped out a few dollops on a paper towel until the colors were both coming out evenly.

Spooookkkkyyyyy!

I simply piped stars around the top of the cake, but honestly, there's enough frosting to do larger swirls if you'd like.

Don't forget about my little friends.

Then I gently placed a skull into the top of each star.

And all was frightful.

And more sprinkles. Because it's me.

...and also because I forgot to clean off my cake board after frosting, so I wanted to hide some blotchy orange and black stains, and sprinkles are a great way to do this. While the outside of the cake is ORANGE (it might even glow in the dark?), the inside is a bit more subdued:

A nice, mellow orange. Sorry for the flashback, my photo takes potato-quality photos in evening light.

I'm giddy with delight at how cool this cake looks. It's a huge departure in style from the cake a novice baker tried her hand at 6 years ago. I enjoy baking in October so much because I can let my inner Wednesday Addams shine and come up with creepy cool cakes I'd love to bake every month, but I realize it wouldn't be as fun or unique if I did this ALL THE TIME. And in a year as useless as Halloween Town's mayor, it's been a ton of fun to have something to actually look forward to...especially when the end result is a delicious citrusy-orange cake with a heavenly smooth cream cheese frosting that I'm sad I have to share, but my husband definitely deserves cake after making it through shoulder surgery earlier this week *and* being married to my spooky self (he's gotta deal with all this spookiness 365 days a year). I'm already churning out new ideas for next October because I truly can't help myself. 'Til next time, my fellow eaters!

"And I just can't wait until next Halloween 'cause I've got some new ideas that will really make them scream..."