The culinary arts room transformed into a spooky scene this week as students competed in a Halloween themed “Mini Cake Wars” contest. Under the guidance of culinary arts teacher Susan Murphy, students showed off their baking and decorating skills by creating small but terrifyingly detailed cakes designed to look “disgusting” in the best way possible.
Murphy discussed the basis of this contest, “This is a scary mini cakes contest, students were tasked with creating disgusting-looking Halloween-themed mini cakes, and everything had to be made from scratch, icing, fondant, cake, and everything.”
To prepare, students first practiced baking a simple sponge cake recipe that they could later adapt or replace for their final design. Once plans for the recipe, ingredients, and designs were approved by Murphy, she gathered all the special ingredients, everything from molding chocolate to food coloring, to help students bring their spooky visions to life.
“They really didn’t have a lot of time, it was a little fast and furious. They had to come in with a written plan and a grocery list ahead of time, or they wouldn’t have been able to compete. But I think some of them practiced at home, and it really showed in their cakes,” Murphy explained.
On competition day, the students assembled their creations. Mixing frosting, sculpting fondant, and adding color to create eerie designs. From freaky eyeballs, to gory bloody scenes, no two cakes looked alike.
At the end of the day, a panel of staff judges arrived (Murphy’s fellow staff members who agreed to
judge) to taste and score the cakes based on appearance, taste, and texture. “The appearance they’re looking for is that scary, disgusting look, but the taste still has to be good, if the flavors don’t work or the cake texture is off, that hurts the score.”
Sophomore Lanie Mcenaney was a student who participated in these cake wars. “It was a light-hearted and fun competition, giving us opportunities to use our own ideas to create,” she shared.
Mcenaney had made a vanilla sponge cake, that looked like a brain on top and had skin on the bottom. She had searched Pinterest for inspiration and combined them together to create her own cake. She worked with Ava Nettleton and Gabby Santello
The Cake Wars winners were “Sweet tooth of Doom”
Murphy believes that “the winning cakes stood out because they had the proper cake texture, great flavor combinations with the cake, filing, icing, and the decorating was spot on for all three cakes.”
However, the cakes that struggled she describes had “flavors that were more bland or the cake itself was not a good formula, the decorating may not have executed the way that they wanted it to.”
Though the contest may have been messy, the results were impressive, and it’s safe to say that Culinary 2’s Mini Cake Wars brought both fright and flavor to the Halloween season.
