“Braaaains!” – does this quote sound familiar? If so, maybe you know the movie that inspired this Halloween brain cake. We don’t really celebrate Halloween at home but we won’t miss an opportunity to put costumes on, make an original cake and have some fun. And so I bring you my first Halloween tutorial for a cake. I will show you how to make a cake that not only looks very real but also tastes good.

It’s easier to make than you might think. Get your kids involved, they will have fun and they will practice their fine motor skills. All you need is a bit of patience and some pretty common ingredients:

about 300g of small fluffy biscuits, any will do but if you live in the Czech Republic, look for “piškoty”
500g unsalted cottage cheese
about 500g of red or red-black jam (I recommend blackberry jam), you can replace part of it by some thick syrup
500g of modelling chocolate – find the tutorial here
round bowl, foil

First, a few words about the modelling chocolate – if you want your cake to be attractive also for the taste buds, really work with the chocolate, don’t replace it with fondants which taste like nothing more than sugar.

Add some jam to the chocolate to give it some color. The brain is rather grey but you won’t go wrong with light pink either. The best jam to use for this is homemade blackberry jam made without gelatine and not blended (just blackberries boiled with sugar). Wrap the chocolate in foil and let it rest over night in a dark and rather colder place.

Let’s make the corpus of the cake. Place the cottage cheese in a bowl and mix with some jam. The pieces of fruit will make the inside of the brain look more real.

Put some foil at the bottom of the round bowl and first place a layer of biscuits in it. Cover them with a layer of the cheese mixture.

Keep alternating the layers until the bowl is full. It doesn’t matter if the last layer is of biscuits or cheese. Same as the chocolate – leave the cake rest over night in a cold place.

Flip the bowl upside down so the cake pops out and use your hands to give it more oval shape (to resemble a brain).

Use a wooden stick to separate the hemispheres.

Roll out the chocolate with your hand to make short round “snakes”. Your kids will be happy to do this for you.

Start placing the pieces on the cake and twisting them to look like the brain gyri.

First cover one hemisphere then the other.

Now you see the gyri are a bit too round and there are spaces between them.

First use your fingers, press the gyri very delicately to make them more flat. The place both your palms on the cake and push slightly together. The gyri should come more together.