Flutterby™! : disembowled succubus cake

"You two are so going to hell for that", said Alec when we unveiled the cake for his graduation party. We were inspired by the awesome Thorax Cake, but Charlene wanted something a little more... personal, so she asked Alec's mom to find out what his favorite D&D character was, "Succubus" was the answer (possibly because of who was asking the question, but since tweaking folks is something we enjoy doing, that was cool).

So we decided on the "disembowled succubus" theme. This took quite a bit of discussion, Dan had fears about Jeanne's feminist reaction to the gory lifeless corpse of an attractive woman as an art piece, Charlene thought it had just the right amount of edginess without going overboard. It turns out Charlene was dead on in her estimation of the various reactions.

We started with a roll of vellum, the largest board we had to carry the cake on, and a bunch of drawings. I'd sketch an idea, lay another sheet over it, and Charlene would help refine it with suggestions about sizes and scale. We went through probably six or seven revisions before we got something that we thought would fit on the board, waste a minimal amount of cake, and be possible to build layer-wise.

We did the cake for the wings on Wednesday evening. Thursday afternoon, Charlene baked 5 yellow cakes. When I got home about 6 I started on the butter cream icing, 12 extra large eggs, 3 lbs of butter, and of course I hadn't thought this fully through, so we didn't have a mixer with a suitable capacity. I started by hand, but after about 30 minutes of whisking Charlene realized that we needed some help and left to get a hand mixer, which made finishing the whole thing possible.

Then we started assembly, cutting out pieces from cake, carefully lifting and placing them onto the masked wing pieces which lay below:

Finally we were ready to layer in the chest bones, here Dan is test-fitting a sternum piece, we eventually decided on a shattered sternum left as whatever ripped out the creature's heart dragged the entrails across her lifeless body.

Long about 11:30 we were tweaking her face one more time and it still wasn't coming together, so we covered everything, put it in the back room, and I woke up at 5:45 or so to continue the march. My experiments with dusting cocoa and cinnamon through stencils weren't working, but Charlene came through with the right combination of those techniques and a few colored sprinkles and details made from cut licorice sticks, and the whole thing gelled rather nicely.

The final picture, alas, doesn't do the cake justice, but it still looked pretty darned good, and got more than the appropriate response from our audience. Overall, we're quite pleased with the effect, but won't be doing cakes again any time soon.

Or at least not until Jeanne's birthday...