Scary, for #LetsLunch

I've made a few Halloween cakes in years past, mostly for Fall Festival cakewalks and class parties, and I managed to find a few pictures of my favorites. The pumpkin beauty, below, was from pre-blogging days or I would have had a two-part series on making it. It involved three batches of my signature pound cake, plus three batches of buttercream. There were three smaller pumpkin cakes, too. I baked them in tube pans and Bundt pans, cemented them together to resemble a sphere, and decorated with orange buttercream and green fondant. My husband, daughter and I spent an evening in the kitchen, baking and decorating. 

The one I wish I had a picture of, but didn't think to do that (again, pre-blogging days) was a chocolate Bundt cake with chocolate glaze topped with a chocolate spiderweb. It was elegant and spooky and had a come-hither chocolate-y-ness about it. I may need to remake that one and take a picture of it. The cake was baked using my go-to chocolate pound cake recipe.

Pumpkin cakes. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

The following year, I decided to ease up on the buttercream and pound cake and came up with a Graveyard cake made with Pepperidge Farm Milano "tombstones" and Peeps ghosts. Here's my very homemade-looking cake:

Graveyard cake. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

I was reminded of this very homemade cake recently when I received this picture from the fine folks at Driscoll's berries - a fruit-enhanced graveyard cake. The ghosts are strawberries dipped in white chocolate, how clever is that? Here's the recipe for this ghoulishly good cake.

Graveyard cake. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books.

Before you go, please click over to my #SeriousSandwich giveaway post to win a copy of Chef Emeril Lagasse's new cookbook, "Emeril's Kicked-Up Sandwiches." Drawing is Friday evening, so the clock is ticking...

#LetsLunch is a monthly Twitter party with a global group of food bloggers. Here's a partial list of October's participants:

Lisa’s Pretzel fingers at Monday Morning Cooking Club
Lucy’s fabulously spooky Halloween cakes at A Cook and Her Books
Annabelle’s Halloween Spice Cookies at A Glass of Fancy
Linda’s Pumpkin Spiced Flan at Spicebox Travels
Rashda’s Spooktacular Stuffed Pumpkin at Hot Curries & Cold Beer

Text and images copyright 2012, Lucy Mercer.