Skull Studded Wedding Cake
Lot’s of marriage vows use the phrase “Til Death Us Do Part” but that usually gets underplayed at the reception… not with this cake, festooned as it is with skulls. I’ve linked to this wonderful shock-food site previously and it’s becoming one of my regular haunts.
EvilCakeHead.com is on the forefront of what I take to be an innovation in contemporary art. Dada took aim at the institution of high art with its timeless masterpieces. Performance art was one, rather rarified and boring, result. Works that are edible yet aesthetic masterpieces accents the transient, time-bound nature of reality while celebrating that impermanence. With Cake! I find these “dark” themed cakes particularly poignant. They are a memento mori that is joyous, rather than brooding.
And of course, they’re just cool as all hell, ain’t they?
Haunted Gingerbread Houses
Gingerbread + Ghosts = this cool haunted gingerbread house!
http://www.haunteddimensions.raykeim.com/index500.html
These plans come from the Haunted Dimensions website which the Good Doktor has profiled before. They make fantastic papercraft models of the Haunted House Attractions at the various Disneyworldlands.
But here, the plans are deliciously transformed to gingerbread. Looking for a way to fuse horror and the holidays? Try buttercream frosting!
Nightmare #309 – The Larval Goddess
(Male, 30′s) Weird dream alert. I don’t know if this is the kind of thing you’re looking for but it was pretty disturbing to me. Just please don’t print my name, OK? I don’t know where this stuff came from.
It was in some kind of a green area, like a clearing in a woods but also institutional like the courtyard of a school. There was a crowd of people gathered, maybe 20 or so. Women as far as I could tell. They were there to see the Goddess. The Goddess was maybe 20 feet tall. Her head was slightly out of proportion, a bit too large for the rest of her. I don’t think she was wearing any clothes but none of her had much detail. She was kind of abstract like a modern sculpture. But her eyes were closed and she was lightly drifting back and forth like a balloon float in the Thanksgiving parade. She had a peaceful smile. She reminded me a bit of a very large insect pupa. VERY large. But frankly I wasn’t that impressed.
There was the table for a blood oath. Devotees of the Goddess had a folding table set up and were trying to get people to do a blood oath to the Goddess because they hoped that would make her wake up. These were everyday, normal looking suburban housewife type people and they brandished this nasty ceremonial knife.
I watched someone give one of these “blood oaths.” They took the knife and they sunk it cleanly through the middle knuckle of their pointer finger. Then they cut again on the other side and handed the knuckle joint to the two women at the booth. The women collected the knuckles in a ziploc baggie – weird, right? and they gave out a bandage for person who’d made the oath. I didn’t feel convinced that the finger would just heal on its own.
Then the women addressed me. They weren’t so concerned about getting me to give a blood oath, thank goodness but they were concerned about what I had eaten for lunch. Come to find out the Goddess has a life-threatening allergy to tree nuts.
I guess they could tell that I indulge in peanut butter or something because just then the whole crowd of Goddess gawkers turned to look at me. All of them, or at least all the ones could see, had bloody bandages wrapped around their pointer fingers. Suddenly, I didn’t feel very comfortable.
Nightmare #302 – Tasty, tasty Infection
(Male, 30′s) This nightmare ended up a lot like a zombie dream but it really was different. The whole set up was strange. I was feeling sick, dizzy or out of balance so I went to the hospital. I was waiting to see a doctor in a long white corridor. I was trying to read a magazine but I felt really uncomfortable. Then I noticed that there was a strange substance coming out from around the joints of my body. It was a little like there were actual seams where the parts of my arm connected at the elbow. The stuff that leaked out was a lot like that spray foam sealant. Except this stuff didn’t set up. It just stayed soft foam.
Needless to say I was concerned.
I went up to the attending nurse and showed the condition. He squinted, looked at the foam very seriously, then he poked his finger into it and tasted it. Yup, he took a dollop of this goo that was slowly seeping from my body and he put it in his mouth.
“It’s… delicious. Light, creamy and sweet.” the nurse declared. His eyes changed and he clearly became possessed with some kind of demonic hunger. He leapt on top of me, his teeth gnashing like he wanted to eat my insides. I hit him forcibly with something heavy and metallic. Maybe it was a bedpan. I looked around for assistance. Up and down the long hallway, doctors and nurses were attacking patients, trying to devour their guts.
I had turned into a cream-filled doughnut. It would be very difficult to get out alive.
Party: Jell-O Blood Worms
Worms are the ideal finger food, high in protein, plentiful on earth, green-friendly.
But if the folks you’ve invited are simply not cool enough to devour the real thing, try these amazing simulations. The technique is elegant and the effect is perfect.
These squiggly wonders are jell-o formed in drinking straws. Once set, run straws under warm water for a moment to loosen and use a rolling pin to extrude.
Yuck and yum!
Anatomy of a Marshmallow Man
What’s REALLY inside a marshmallow man. And I don’t mean the ingredients list. Bid now on eBay.
Other Haunts – Zombie Birthday Cake
Can we call the whole zombie craze, ah, “dead” so to speak, now that eight year old kids are asking that their birthday cakes be made in the shape of an undead corpse? (more…)
Nightmare #257 – Midnight Snack
“…And there was the smell, horrible stench of blood and manure, the smell of a slaughterhouse…”
Nightmare #233 – The Shrinking City
(Female, 40′s) This was a weird dream, with very slow-moving action taking place over what felt like a long time. I was in a city, with all the survivors. Outside the city were the zombies. They were the old-fashioned slow-moving kind. There was a big fence around the entire city keeping the zombies outside. We survivors on the inside felt rather smug.
“…the people you knew were slowly disappearing too…”
But the problem was that the city was getting a little smaller every day. The zombies would manage to break through in one spot and take over a building and kill all the people in it. Then we would move the fence in and life would go on. The people you knew were slowly disappearing too. Near the end of the dream, we were down to about a dozen buildings and maybe only 100 survivors.
Then I walked into a room where there were 3 or 4 people down on the floor. “Are they zombies?” I asked someone. Then I realized that no, they were survivors like me. They were down on their hands and knees eating the carpet, because it was all that was left to eat.
Things were looking pretty grim.
This Just In: Crawling Zombie Jello Mold
This demented little goodie is made available by the mad geniuses at ThinkGeek.com. It’s perfect for folks who think that it’s not enough fun to come to a potluck with a jello shaped like a human brain. This one looks like the torso of a zombie.
The culinary possibilities are nearly endless. My next birthday cake had better be decorated like a graveyard complete with green colored coconut shavings (grass) with one of these little beauties erupting from a tomb with my name on it.
Nightmare #215 – The Death Hospital
(Male, 30′s) Only part of the dream was a nightmare but it occurred at the end of a longer dream that was just disorienting, probably not exactly a nightmare, where I was wandering lost through a college campus trying to find something to eat. I knew there was an excellent restaurant around someplace but when I found it, it was closed for some holiday. I looked in the windows. There were huge steaming trays of food. They were prepared for a celebration and I wasn’t included or invited.
“… It was extremely contagious but no one was exactly certain how it spread…”
The nightmare stared when I stumbled into a hospital. It looked like any of the other college buildings – dark red brick with ornate stone insets. The hospital was dedicated to treat people suffering from some very dangerous illness. It was extremely contagious but no one was exactly certain how it spread. I was on the nursery ward. There were only a couple real nurses, people who knew what they were doing but there were several volunteers who more or less just kept getting in the way. I was a volunteer. The first task was to carry these infants in and place them on these high folding beds where the intake nurse could assess them. The intake nurse was very beautiful but very mean and she looked sort of like someone I work with. She yelled at everyone constantly.
None of these babies looked very good: they were waxy, barely breathing if they were breathing at all. They were all tightly wrapped in white blankets. One of the babies I carried in was black and I don’t mean African-American. The child was black like it was carved out of black wax. The intake nurse started yelling at me. Wasn’t it obvious that this child was dead? And worse, wasn’t it obvious that this child was a fruiting body for the infection. She started scrubbing down the area, though it’s strange to call it that because nothing she did involved water. The intake nurse wrapped the baby in the blankets. Then she used a flat thin piece of metal to scrape the top layer of wax off the floor. She yelled for assistance from another nurse. The other nurse was extremely ugly in the sense that she was physically deformed. She was bald and her face had huge round growths on the forehead, some the size of a softball. But she was patient with the intake nurse’s abuse and understanding with the volunteers who were all doing as best as we could, as best as we knew how. As soon as this second nurse was in the room, the intake nurse scooped up the dead infected baby and started to leave the room. But I seemed to be standing exactly in the place where she wanted to move. So she kept yelling at me and swearing over and over again, “Get out of the way! Get out of the way!”
It was possible that we all had been infected and would die
Nightmare #187 – Horror Hor D’oeurves
(Female, 40′s) A couple friends stopped by our house unannounced, and we suddenly decided to have a party and invite some more people over. Then we needed to come up with lots of snacks so I went to our freezer, which in the dream was a huge walk-in freezer, and there were all kinds of things in there, like laid-in provisions, packages of frozen meats and a whole stack of frozen waffles. But I was looking for some kind of snack food, like a frozen pizza. I thought I might have had a container of frozen shrimp or oysters — although I have no idea why I thought I’d find those in my freezer!– or barbecued spareribs, something just small and tasty.
But all I could find as snack food was a package of marinated miniature vampire monkey brains! It had a little picture of a vampire monkey on the front! It was like a brand-name package, too, not some sketchy thing. I took them out of the package and they were frozen in kind of a flat sheet. I could see all their little vampire teeth because their mouths were open. But I wanted to make sure that there was enough for every one so I cut them in half! With one good chop along the jaw line.
And then I put them in a pan on the stove and started stirring them. And in the dream I had a sense of both satisfaction because I’d found a snack for everyone as well as revulsion, like “Yuck, I don’t want to eat these things!”
Nightmare #42 – Vacation Warnings
(Male, middle aged) An epic length nightmare here and it sort of developed out of another dream. My family was on vacation, my wife and I and my daughter and my mother. We had spent a couple nights in this hotel in a big city but we hadn’t really been having too much fun. I think we just realized it was our last day.
…I heard a faint whispery voice from inside the hole. It warned “Get out…”
The hotel had a lot of strange services, in addition to what you’d expect like a pool and a gym. For instance, the hotel had a lab, like a chemistry lab that you could use to do experiments. I was in the lab with a couple other men who wore white lab coats. They were showing off things but I really wasn’t that interested. Although it was a pretty well kept hotel, there was a pretty serious crack in the wall of the lab down by the floor, a crack probably 6 inches wide. The two guys saw I was interested in this and handed me a telescoping meter stick for me to see how deep the crack was. I got down on my hands and knees and inserted the ruler and it registered over 25 feet which I thought was impossible. But as I was down there, I heard a faint whispery voice from inside the hole. It warned “Get out of the buildings. Even the cars.” Almost immediately a low insistent rumble started and I thought it was an earthquake. I ran to the hotel room where my family was and told them we had to get outside. It seemed to take forever since everyone felt they had to take a couple choice belongings with them and the hotel room was a mess, belongings strewn a foot thick over the whole floor.
When we got outside the streets were crowded with many other people who had heard the rumbling too. But this was part of the country that never had an earthquake so after a couple minutes people got skeptical and restless. Just then, a building in the distance collapsed literally like a house of cards, the walls and the floors perfectly flattening on top of each other. Another building much closer began to swell like it was a square balloon filled with water. Then, like an over-filled water balloon, the building burst showering the street with papers and furniture. The parking lot across the street was filled with cars and all of a sudden they flattened out, like they were cutouts of sheet metal painted to look like cars. Then they started rumbling forward, stacking on top of each other. I think some people were crushed underneath these advancing stacks of shelled out cars. The rumbling stopped but people were leaving the city without looking back. My family for some reason wanted to look back. They went back into the dark and abandoned hotel where we were staying and started packing. I could hear a series of loud thunks out in the hallway and tried to get them to hurry. I looked out in the hallway. There were a small gang of skin heads, systematically kicking down the hotel room doors and looting what was inside. I finally got my family to leave just before the skinheads got to our room.
Then eventually things went back to normal. For some reason we stayed in town and didn’t head home. The hotel had comped us several nights stay. When we went back to our room, all of our belongings had been picked up, the clothing put on hangers in the closet, the items on shelves and in drawers. No maid could have been so meticulous. We decided to take a subway ride and on the subway, I hear the voice again. “At the next subway stop, don’t look.” I told my family to close their eyes no matter what happened. We were just pulling into a station. I cupped my elbow around my eyes but still peeked out every now and then, especially when the screaming started. Evidently some thing had descended to the subway platform just as the doors closed. She was dressed in flowing brown clothes from what I could tell – sort of “Stevie Nicks” if Stevie Nicks was a monster who could float and kill people just by looking at them. Yup. Everyone who looked at it directly had their heads explode. Probably eight to twelve people in the subway car I was in succumbed. The train pulled away from the station and people were still screaming and crying.
The next warning came in musical cues and in the dream I was tone deaf. I had convinced someone else about these warnings and for some reason he was able to hear them too. He was a musician and was able to translate the cues for me. There was a small mark on the floor shaped like an apple that I was supposed to touch. Then there was a patch of light shining on the wall that I was supposed to touch. I guess we did everything we had to because nothing bad happened.
We were leaving the city by train when I heard the voice again. I asked my wife if she had a mirror. She had a small slightly convex one for some reason. My plan was that if the monster showed herself again that I would reflect her image back at her and thereby destroy her. No such luck. The warning mentioned something about cola. There was a six pack of cola that we’d brought with us. I touched the cans and two of them were extremely hot and starting to swell. I could imagine them exploding like bombs sending shards of aluminum throughout the train car. I opened the train window and popped open the cans to relieve the pressure and then emptied the contents and threw away the empties. The next warning came immediately afterward, something about deep fried food. I just then realized that the train car behind us was an old fashioned caboose that had been set up as a kitchen. I stepped inside. It was like something from another time. Wooden paneling and flooring. All the appliances were cast iron – the stove, the skillets… and at the end of the caboose, a huge frying vat filled with oil. Bubbles were starting to surge up from the bottom like it was boiling hot. I turned to my daughter who has some experience in food service and asked what she’d do with used deep fryer oil. “I’d wrap it in tin foil.” I looked back at the fryer, filled with over ten gallons of scalding hot grease and realized that wouldn’t be a solution. I just had picked up the handle of the frying baskets when I woke up.
Phobia #1 – The End of Food
(Male, early 20′s) You ask about strange fears, well, I can’t eat the ends of things. Like hot dogs, I have to chop the ends off. They just look weird. Or eggrolls. I can eat most of one, but as soon as I get through half of it, it starts to look like it’s something else, like it’s a creature that’s excreting something and I just can’t finish. And I can’t eat egg whites, only the yolks maybe because they stay warm longer.
Sometimes, if I’m eating some and I don’t totally dig it, I’ll make it into an end. By imagining it. Like with a breast of a chicken or something. I feel strange when I eat at people’s houses and they make a wonderful meal and i can’t eat the ends of things.
But I love the crusts on bread. Pizza crusts too.
Nightmare #5 – The Withering Hosts
(Male, 30) I’m the guest of this couple, a man and a woman in this huge house. I follow a path down to this luscious garden filled with flowers that I’ve never seen before and fruits I’ve never eaten. Everything is beyond belief gorgeous like that garden in Willy Wonka, that kind of luscious. Everything is just delicious. I eat for awhile and I want to go but my hosts don’t want me to. Not only that, I find that I’m trapped. There’s no way out the garden or the house. I start to panic. I rush around frantic, trying to find an escape and as I do, the couple begins to age. By the time I actually find a door, they’re probably a hundred years older. As I finally exited, I woke up.
