Halloween is right around the corner! And if you need a rockin’ cool cake to make for your Halloween party (or any other zombie related event), you should try your hand at making a zombie graveyard cake. It’s not too bad to make this sucker and the best part is that is doesn’t have to look neat – zombies like gorging on flesh, they’re not exactly concerned with how they look, you know.

This is a repost from my old craft blog that I decided to port over here for the holiday. Enjoy!

[zombie graveyard - view one]

The cake is a yellow cake with vanilla pastry cream (dyed red) and fresh strawberries in the middle with chocolate frosting.

[zombies coming up out of the dirt]

The zombies are made with a candy man mold which I originally bought on eBay (like this man mold or this one).

I filled the molds with melted white chocolate chips – I spread chocolate around in the mold and then let the chocolate cool in the freezer. I only used the top half of the mold – the body part and the arms part since that was all I needed. After it had hardened, I popped the chocolates out of the molds and pressed them together (again, using more melted white chocolate to make the pieces stick together).

[more zombies]

I used food coloring to paint them, though that was not a very efficient method, but the sloppiness of it turned out in my favor. I used the food coloring to paint the hair, the eyes, and a crude shirt onto each zombie, with a tint of red around the lips. You could try using a little melted white chocolate with food coloring, but I just used straight food coloring with a fresh paintbrush that had never been used on anything else so that it would be food safe.

The tombstones are milano cookies dipped in white chocolate with a few drops of black food coloring to create the grey color. I used the paint brush again to flick spots of black to create a “stony” look.

The zombies are just stuffed right into the cake with “fresh dirt” piled around them to hide any cake crumbs.  The “fresh dirt” is crushed Oreo cookies.

This cake was originally made for one of our themed birthday parties for Heather back in 2006! I can’t believe it’s been that long.

I also redid this cake for my office work Halloween party two years ago – very similar, just a smaller, round cake instead. I got a little smarter this time around and used a gel paste to write “RIP” on the tombstones instead of painting it out with food coloring that would not paint well…

The sucky thing about a round cake is there’s way less room for the graves and zombie torsos.

This zombie is still trying to get out. I want to also make a fence out of pretzels but I ran out of time when I made this one.

Hope you enjoy the photos and have fun making your own zombie cake!