Little Shop of Horrors

by Gail
(Oak Park, IL)

I made this cake for a theatre fundraiser. It was inspired by the musical "Little Shop of Horrors" and is my representation of the blood-thirsty man-eating plant from the show.

The bottom of the cake is two 9-inch rounds of carrot cake, with vanilla buttercream filling. for the top, I baked some of the carrot cake batter in a bowl, to make a dome shape. I cut a deep vee into the middle of it to make the mouth. Both the bottom and the dome were iced with buttercream then covered with fondant. I used leaf green for the base color of the fondant, then mottled it with some moss green and butter yellow.

I used buttercream to stick the dome on top of the base. I then used red fondant to line the mouth, and white fondant that I cut into teeth around the edges. I rolled out green fondant between my hands to make a rope that went around the mouth as "lips". I also rolled out long vines from the green fondant, which I stuck all over the cake, as well as along the bottom edge. I rolled the fondant out thinly and cut leaves in three different sizes, then curled them in different directions for realism and left them out to dry that way.

The eyeballs are made of black and red fondant, with green fondant eyelids to stick them to the cake.

When the leaves and vines were dried into the various shapes, I stuck them all over the cake.

The finishing touch was an arm and a leg from a doll that I stuck into the mouth, and then dripped "blood" over the limbs and the mouth. The blood glaze was made from powdered sugar and water, and the color was true red with a little burgundy added to make it realistically blood-colored.