Here are 10 easy ideas for Halloween cake decorations. You don’t need any cake decorating experience for these and you can even do some of them with kids!
All you need is parchment paper or wax paper for these first Halloween cake decorations. Start by making an eery purple sky with your frosting. Tinting buttercream purple and then put half into another bowl and add a few drops of black to make grey. Spread the grey buttercream onto the top of the cake and smooth it. Then spread it around the top of the sides of the cake, too. Spread purple around the bottom of the cake, leaving the middle empty for now. Then mix the leftover purple and grey buttercream together and spread that over the middle.
Press your spatula lightly into the frosting and drag it up and down as you spin the cake. You'll leave zig zag textured imprinted into the frosting. These blend the colours together so that you don’t end up with stripes of colour around the cake. Smooth the frosting with a cake comb to make ombre frosting.
You can leave the top edge uneven, which is trendy at the moment, or flatten it. To flatten it, swipe sideways with your spatula to lift off the excess frosting. Now put the cake in the fridge for about an hour to chill and set the frosting. Meanwhile, I'll show you how to make stencils using parchment paper or wax paper.
Draw a bat silhouette onto a strip of paper and fold the paper a few times before you cut it out. Now you'll have a few identical bats. You don’t need the surrounding paper for this.
For the next stencils you’ll do the opposite. Draw the outline of a haunted house, cutting along the bottom edge so that the house sits at the base of the cake. Then cut the house out and throw that away but keep the surrounding paper. This will be your stencil.
I drew a few windows and cut those out of another piece of paper. This is an extra step that you can skip if you’re in a rush. The house will still look haunted without them! Trace around something round like a bottle to make a circle for a moon stencil, too.
Now you’re going to apply these in 3 stages. Start with the bats, pressing them onto the cake on the darkest grey frosting, towards the top, and they’ll stick because the warmth of your fingers will soften the cold buttercream to make it lightly sticky as you push against the bats.
They press the moon stencil on, so that it overlaps one of the bats. Pipe or spread white buttercream over the stencil, scraping over it a few times to flatten and smooth the frosting, and then peel the moon stencil off.
Next, use edible glitter and a wide powder brush to gently dab the frosting over the bats so that there’s quite a lot all around them.
Then slide your spatula or a toothpick under each bat to peel it off and it will look like the bats are flying in the moonlight!
Now wrap the haunted house stencil around the cake, and you want this to wrap really tightly since the bottom edge is cut so use pins to attach both sides to the cake. Add a drop of black to your leftover grey buttercream and spread this colour over the haunted house stencil and then scrape over it once or twice so that the black buttercream is smooth.
Pull the pins out of the cake and peel the stencil off and voila! If you’re adding windows, put the cake into the fridge for 15 minutes to set the ouse and then press the final stencil onto the house, lining it up so that the windows are in the right places, and then peel then spread white buttercream over the windows. Scrape off the excess.
Peel the stencil off, and scrape off any smudges using a toothpick and since the black frosting of the haunted house has chills dead set, you won’t damage that when you scrape off any white smudges. This cake design is so simple to make but with the glitter it looks so fancy!
For this next cake I’m using non-traditional Halloween colours, with pale pink and orange, which I LOVE but for this design you can use any colour or colours - plain orange, orange and black stripes, whatever!
The two important things are to use buttercream that isn’t very stiff, so add a splash of milk to thin it out until you can stir it easily like this, and spoon it into a piping bag. The second important thing is to chill the cake in the fridge for at least an hour before you pipe onto it.
Squeeze a blob of white buttercream onto the cake and then use a spatula to gently spread it in any direction. You’re making floating ghosts on the cake. They don’t all need to be identical so pipe different sized blobs before you spread them, and go in different direction so the ghosts are flying to the left, right, up, down…
When you finish making the bodies, melt some chocolate chips and put them into a sandwich bag like a ziplock bag and cut a tiny piece off one corner. Squeeze the bag to pipe two eyes and a mouth onto each ghost. If the chocolate pulls away with the bag, use a toothpick to nudge it flat against the cake.
You could add black oil based gel to the chocolate to make it black instead of brown, but with semi sweet or dark chocolate like this, against the lighter colours - pink and orange and white - the dark brown looks almost black.
The trick to melting chocolate without it seizing and becoming grainy or getting that white.. haze when it sets, is to heat it slowly and gently, so if you use the microwave choose 50% power for 30 seconds at a time, stirring before repeating, until the chocolate is smooth.
If you're looking for more ideas for ghost Halloween cake decorations, move on to the next cake!
For more detailed ghosts or any other figures, use the pointillist technique. You'll outline a shape on your cake using a cookie cutter, or draw it with a toothpick.
Then fill it in with tiny dots by using a small round piping tip like a #3. Your dots will look the neatest if you pipe in rows.
This dotted effect is so unique and easy to make look neat even if it’s your first time doing it! This technique is a bit time consuming but I love the result!
The consistency of your buttercream is really important for this. If it’s too stiff you’ll have to squeeze the bag really hard to pipe the dots and your wrist will start aching almost immediately.
Switch colours to add more details, for a simple design like this or a more elaborate one like this:
This is one of the cakes from my Layer Up program, which has 14 hours of video module teaching hundreds of cake decorating techniques and designs! Start a FREE 7 day trial of my cake school to try it out risk free!
So, which ghosts do you prefer - swooshed or pointillist? Tell me in the comment!
Make easy Halloween cake toppers with melted chocolate in a sandwich bag with the corner cut off. Write whatever word you like, keeping in mind that the thicker the letters, the better. Press a toothpick into each letter so that it sticks out at the bottom.
Then pour sprinkles on top. The sprinkles will stick to the melted chocolate but when they set, after about 30 minutes in the fridge, you can lift the letters up and poke the toothpicks into a cake to make a delicious cake topper!
To write a longer Halloween message, use buttercream that’s thinned out with a bit of milk so that you can pipe it with a small round tip and the lines won’t break apart.
If you struggle to pipe letters with lines, which does take a bit of practice, use the pointillist technique. This is the same techniques I used for the second style of ghosts. You'll pipe dots to form your letters, which gives you more time to form the letters.
It's best to chill your cake before you start piping your message. This way, if you pipe anything you don’t like you can scrape it off with your offset spatula and start again!
To make cute little monsters, layer a cake or I’ll show you how to do this with cupcakes in a second. Pop it into the freezer for 10 minutes or the fridge for 30 minutes and then use a serrated knife like a bread knife to trim around the top to make a dome.
Spread a thin layer of frosting to cover the cake, to stop it from drying out. You can use plain white buttercream or a flavour like chocolate or the same colour as the monster’s fur is going to be. By chilling the cake before this it will stay firm instead of leaning or toppling over as you trim it and frost it, and it will also be a lot less crumbly.
Now put buttercream for the fur into a piping bag with any star shaped tip, like this 4B or a 1M, or a grass tip like this:
Start at the bottom of the cake, squeezing to push out the fur. Then release your pressure on the piping bag as you pull away so that the buttercream pulls away neatly.
Work your way up to the top of the cake. Piping from the bottom to the top is a good idea for two reasons. Firstly, so that you can see what you’re doing, because if you start at the top, by the time you get to the bottom you’ll have to crouch down to see where you’re piping. And secondly, for fur piped with a grass tip, each row of fur will overlap the row below, so by starting at the very bottom you’ll create this shaggy effect.
Straight after piping the fur, while the frosting is still soft and sticky, cut mini marshmallows in half and press a toothpick through the middle of each half.
Push a mini chocolate chip into that hole and you have an eyeball! Press the eyeballs into the monster’s fur to complete the monster.
You can do this with cupcakes instead, which is a fun activity with kids. To make it easier, use an elastic band or a strong clip to pinch the piping bag at the top. This makes it easier to squeeze the buttercream out through the piping tip.
With a few drops of colour and some mini marshmallows and mini chocolate chips, you can make these fun Halloween cupcakes in just a few minutes!
Another easy monster option is to use a donut or mini bundt cake mold. Use a cupcake recipe and spoon or pipe cake batter into it. Bake for the same time as cupcakes.
After they cool, make a drip by measuring 1 cup of white chocolate chips. Heat 1/3 of a cup of heavy cream or double cream until it starts to bubble and pour the hot cream over the chocolate. Push all of the chocolate underneath the cream and let it sit for the minute and then stir it until it’s smooth. Then add oil-based colour. I used yellow and blue to make green.
Don’t use water based colours that you’d use for buttercream because it can make the chocolate seize.
When it cools to room temperature, do a test drip on the side of the bowl and you’re looking for a thick, slow drip. Spoon this over the cakes.
It’s best to chill the cakes first for a few minutes int he fridge or freezer. Cold cake will help the drip stop dripping. Push in some candy eyes balls and it’s done! Another fun one to make with kids.
Now let’s make some pumpkins! Use a star shaped piping tip like this #32 tip or a medium round tip like a #8. Start on the edges and work your way in, to make the pumpkins look more rounded and realistic.
Now for the fun part that will grab everyone’s attention. Pipe a few pumpkins onto parchment paper or wax paper and freeze for 10 minutes to chill and harden. Then brush them with edible gold paint, getting into all of the grooves to cover them completely or just painting some accents.
Lift them up and press them onto your cake to make gold buttercream pumpkins!
Pipe stems using brown buttercream or chocolate buttercream and a small star shaped tip or round tip. This makes such a cozy fall or autumn themed cake!
To make a pumpkin that’s a jack-o-lantern, frost your cake and put it into the fridge for at least an hour. Draw a face onto parchment or wax paper and cut out the features, leaving the rest of the paper intact. Press it down onto the cold cake.
Spread black frosting over the top, scraping a few times to leave a thin, flat layer.
Then peel off the stencil and you have a jack-o-lantern cake that took you two minutes to decorate!
Which cake would you choose to eat? Which one would you make? Tell me in the comments and visit my cake school to learn hundreds of other cake designs and cake decorating techniques!
You can also watch a video of this tutorial on 10 easy ideas for Halloween cake decorations:
