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| Sweet Offerings of Horror |
| I was fortunate enough to take a few moments of Barbara Jo’s time and learn more about her website, cake decorating, and pumpkin carving. Once you take a look at the imagery and artwork, I think you will agree this is one woman who knows how to take horror to the next level. With the help of her sister Barbara May, these women keep quite busy, and pay homage to the horror field. (Q)Barbara, I was directed to a link of yours http://www.theyrecoming.com and was blown away by the cakes you create. First off though, I was interested to know how you came up with the name of your website? (A)Barbara May and I were driving to Costco one day when we came up with the idea to start our own horror movie review website. The fist thing that popped into my head was, “They’re coming to get you, Barbara,” which is a line from my all-time favorite horror movie, The Night of the Living Dead. Although, actually in the movie, she spells her name Barbra, but we decided to go with the more usual spelling. That’s also how we decided on our pseudonyms, Barbara Jo and Barbara May. (Q)I also noticed you are a huge fan of horror. What would be your favorite movie and actor/actress of all time? (A)As I said, Night of the Living Dead is both my favorite horror movie, and the movie to which I trace my undying love of horror in general. I don’t know that I have one favorite actor or actress, but I do have a soft spot for the classical horror actors like Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, and Boris Karloff. (Q)Was it your interest in horror that led you to decorating cakes? (A)Not really. The two hobbies sort of developed separately and then converged. (Q)If not then what was your inspiration to start doing such elaborate décor? (A)I guess I just do most things pretty elaborately, so when I started baking cakes, naturally I went overboard with that, too. (Q)Does your sister Barbara May help with the cakes as well? (A)Sometimes she does, yes. Just this last year we went to a two-week long master class in cake decorating together and then collaborated on a wedding cake for a good friend of ours. Of course, the wedding cake wasn’t horror themed, though it did have dancing pygmy yeti on it. (Q)About how much time goes into doing the cakes in general? (A)It varies a lot. When I do simple, spur of the momentcakes they can take as little as six hours, but most of my cakes take at least a full day (twelve to eighteen hours) and the complex ones I can work on for a week or more. (Q)Which cake took you the longest to put together from start to finish? (A)Definitely the most time consuming cake I’ve made so far was the wedding cake I mentioned earlier. Barbara May and I both worked on that for over a week. Just designing the structure took a while – each layer was cantilevered out from the layer underneath – and we had a lot of gum paste flowers, leaves, and animals to make before we even started baking the actual cake. We also sculpted big plates to put on top of each layer and cast them in sugar. The two of us spent the entire day before the wedding working on it (about 18 hours) but before that we probably put in an additional 40 hours each. It was all worth it though, of course. (Q)What has been the most popular/asked for cake? (A)The thoracic cavity cake has definitely generated the most attention on the site, but the simpler bleeding heart cake is a popular one, too. It’s pretty easy to make, so I get a fair number of requests for instructions for that one. (Q)What has been your favorite to make and why? (A) My favorite cake to make was an erupting volcano Monster Island cake (complete with marzipan Godzilla, Rodan, and Gamera) that I made for my sister’s birthday about four years ago. It was right before her wedding so our parents were in town and Dad and I worked on it together all day, perfecting the eruption mechanism while Mom photographed the whole occasion for posterity. It was just a really nice thing to do together as a family. I drafted a construction plan for it later and gave that to Dad for his birthday. (Q)Do you remember the first one you created? (A) Well, I used to make cakes occasionally as a kid for birthdays and such but nothing particularly fancy. The cake that I trace my current hobby to I made about six years ago. For some reason it occurred to me that a cake made in a bunt pan is shaped sort of like an island with a secret lagoon in the middle, so for the next convenient occasion, which happened to be Barbara May’s boyfriend’s (now husband’s) birthday I made a bunt cake and put a blue frosting ocean around it and a marzipan dinosaur munching on a marzipan palm tree inside it. It was pretty simple compared to my more recent cakes, but it was fun enough to get me hooked. (Q)What is the strangest ingredient you’ve added? (A) Honestly, the ingredients are all pretty normal. Most of the recipes and techniques I use are fairly common; I just adapt them to my own bizarre purposes. For instance, when I talk about blood pouring out of the cake, it’s actually a really tasty sauce made from fresh raspberries and lemon juice. (Q)Was there a flavor of icing or filling that didn’t taste especially good? (A) Actually, a lot of my cakes have more icing on them than really would be optimal for taste, especially since I use a lot of rolled fondant icing. It’s great for getting a smooth surface to work with, but it’s not the best tasting icing in the world. It’s not bad, really; it just doesn’t taste like much except sugar. Once I made a dragon cake that breathed fire, which required a pretty thick layer of fondant for the dragon scales, so most people just ate the cake and left the fondant, so everyone had big pieces of dragon skin sitting on their plates. It was pretty funny. I also had a problem the fist time I tried to make white modeling chocolate. I must have added too much corn syrup because it was really gooey and sticky and it never set up the way it’s supposed to. I did better the next time, though. Also, the first time I made a bleeding heart cake I used a store-bought syrup as blood and it wasn’t very good. From then on I made my own blood. (Q)Was there a cake in particular that just didn’t work out no matter what you tried? (A) To be honest, a lot of my cakes have facets that don’t work out the way I want them too, even if the overall cake is a success. I figure that’s to be expected, as I’m almost always making up techniques as I go along or trying things I’ve never done before. I always say that if you’re always sure that whatever you’re doing is going to work, you aren’t trying hard enough. One cake in particular that didn’t work out at all was an Egyptian-themed cake I made for a friend’s birthday with was supposed to have a secret button which, when pressed, caused bugs to explode into the air, like the flesh-eating beetles in the Mummy. I built a little spring-loaded platform and put gummy bugs on it, but I put it in the cake while the cake was still warm and all the bugs melted together. When she pushed the button, a sort of tremor ran through the cake and a few cracks appeared but nothing came out. We cut into the cake and just found one solid lump of gummy. Blech! (Q)What would you say is the most disgusting cake you’ve made? (A) If we’re just talking cakes, it would have to be the thoracic cavity cake, but I think most of my friends would agree that the cordial cherry eyeballs were even more disgusting than that. They looked pretty realistic and they gave such a satisfying spurt of liquid when you bit into them. (Q)What has been the reaction from friends and family? (A) My family couldn’t be prouder. Mom made a little scrapbook of all my cakes and carries it around with her and shows it to anyone who will sit still long enough. Most of my friends also love the cakes (or at least they tell me they do), but when Barbara May brings the leftovers in to work the day after a party no one will eat them until she cuts it up into unrecognizable pieces. I only wish I could have seen everyone’s reactions to walking into the office kitchen to find three quarters of a zombie head covered in saran wrap sitting on the counter. (Q)My favorite, though the thorax cake is pretty amazing, is the zombie cake. http://www.theyrecoming.com/extras/zombiefest/ However did that come to mind? (A) I made the zombie cake for Zombiefest, a party we threw to celebrate the posting of our hundredth review on theyrecoming.com. He’s basically a three-dimensional version of our website logo, rendered in cake. (Q)How long did that take from start to finish? (A) I started about a week before the party building the blood spurting mechanism (when I pushed on his shoulder at the party, blood shot out of his eyes) and experimenting with his hard candy eyeballs and attempting to make a jellied brain, which never did quite work out, so I had to settle for a royal icing skull fragment instead. I also had to make all the french cream candies to use as dirt. I probably put in a good fifteen hours of work in the week before the party and then another eighteen or twenty hours straight the day before the party. I actually was pretty creeped out by my own cake when I was turning off the lights to go to bed at five o’clock in the morning the day before the party, so I knew it was turning out really well. (Q)For the thorax cake http://www.theyrecoming.com/extras/pumpkinfest03/ how were you able to make the rib cage stay in place? (A) The rib cage actually sort of slowly crumbled throughout the party, as it was about ninety degrees outside that day. If it hadn’t been so hot, I don’t think I would have had any problem. Certainly it was very stable the night before when it was still cool. I simply made the ribs out of white chocolate, waited for them to harden and then dipped the end into a little more melted white chocolate to stick them to the tray. (Q)Are you really able to make the heart beat? (A) I have once made a beating heart cake. It was pretty early in my heart-shaped cake-baking career and I think I could do a much better job now, but it was still pretty neat. It was shaped like a Valentine heart, not like an anatomical heart and it had a plastic baggie full of raspberry sauce inside it, with just a thin layer of cake over top. The bag was attached via a plastic tube to a turkey baster, so when I squeezed the bulb on the baster, it made the bag inside the cake expand so it looked like the heart was beating. If I were to do it again, first of all I’d probably make it more anatomically correct, and I’d also try to hook it up to a pump so it could beat continuously throughout the party until the cake was served. I’ve also got a plan for a heart cake covered with a clear candy shell with raspberry sauce pumping through underneath the shell, so it would look like you were seeing the blood circulating though the heart. I’m hoping to be able to make that one for next Halloween. (Q)Is there a design for a cake you have wanted to try but haven’t done yet? (A) I actually have a file of cake ideas that I haven’t gotten around to yet. Some of them are just rough concepts; some are fully developed ideas I just haven’t found an occasion for yet. Most recently, I was hoping to be able to make a cake of a severed human arm being devoured by rats for a party celebrating our 200th review on theyrecoming.com, but we got too busy to have the party and the cake never happened. I’m still hoping to make it sometime. The plan was to make the arm in layers so that when a section of it was cut, it would have bones and marrow and everything inside, just like a real arm. (Q)What do people say about what you do? (A) One comment that I get a lot is that I must have too much time on my hands, which isn’t true at all. I’m just as busy as everyone else, though I sometimes have a more flexible schedule than some. I just choose to spend my free time differently from most people. A lot of people also find it strange that I expend so much effort on something that’s just going to be eaten, but to me that’s part of the appeal. I mean, I could have made a sculpture of a thoracic cavity out of a more permanent material, but what would be the point of that? Cutting into the cake and eating it makes the whole experience so much richer than just looking at a thoracic cavity sculpture sitting on a table. Plus, what would I do with it after the party? (Q)Is this a hobby or have you ever considered making it a business? (A) I won’t say I’ve never considered going into business, but I’m not sure I’m really ready for that yet. This way I get to make whatever I want to make, not what someone else wants me to make. (Q)Besides cakes, are there other foods you decorate/create? (A) I make candy pretty frequently, usually just normal candy, though, no fancy decorating. Every year Barbara May and I also make and decorate one or two really elaborate gingerbread houses apiece. We’ve been doing that for more than twenty years now. Other than that, I really don’t cook at all. (Q)I noticed you throw some special parties, Pumpkinfest and Zombiefest, how did those come about? Do you throw any other parties in the year? (A) The two big annual parties we throw are Pumpkinfest, where we all carve pumpkins, and Gingerbreadfest, where we all make gingerbread houses. We also have various other craft fests whenever we come up with a good ides for one, but they aren’t usually nearly as elaborate. We’ve only had the one Zombiefest so far to celebrate posting our 100th movie review, but we may have another one at some point. I don’t really remember whether Pumpkinfest or Gingerbreadfest came first, but we started both of them because we have so much fun carving pumpkins and decorating gingerbread houses that we wanted to share it with all of our friends. I think a lot of adults, especially those without children, forget how much fun this kind of stuff can be. (Q)You also do an amazing job at carving pumpkins. http://www.theyrecoming.com/extras/pumpkins03/ About how long does it take for you to carve one? (A) Anywhere from half an hour to about six hours per pumpkin, depending on the complexity of the design. (Q)I especially liked the “bats” and “poison apple”. Do you draw those first and then carve them? (A) Yes, I almost always draw a pattern first, photocopy it to the appropriate size, tape it to the pumpkin, and carve right through the paper. (Q)What inspired you to start carving pumpkins? (A) About seven years ago Barbara May and I stumbled across a pack of little pumpkin carving saws made by a company called Pumpkinmasters. We gave them a try and they worked great! I was hooked for life. We ran out and bought three more sets and Pumpkinfest was born! (Q)I’ve tried carving pumpkins and I must admit, they look pathetic afterwards. Do you have any special trick on carving you would like to share? (A) You won’t believe the difference the little saws make. I highly recommend them. I also find pumpkin selection to be very important. It helps to have a nice smooth, flat surface to your pumpkin and, in general, I find that a darker colored pumpkin will be tougher than a lighter colored pumpkin, which tend to be pretty soft. A soft pumpkin is, of course, faster to carve, but a tougher pumpkin is better is your design has a lot of fine detail or fragile sections. It’s also important to scrape the inner walls of a pumpkin to a good, even thickness before you start carving. I find about half an inch to be the ideal. (Q)What other art and horror related things do you do? (A) Professionally, I work as a theatrical designer and scenic artist. Occasionally I even get to work on some horror shows. I used to work with a company called Thrillpeddlers in San Francisco. They do an annual Halloween show called Shocktoberfest. It’s a series of short plays from the Grand Guignol, which is French horror theater from the first half of the century. Lots of blood and sex. Very fun. I also do other painting and drawings and sculptures at times, whenever something interesting occurs to me. I once did a drawing of what Barbara May would look like as a vampire. (Q)Is there something you still want to try? (A) There are always lots of things I want to try. Right now I want to learn more about remote control, automations, and small electronics. I think that would really open a lot of avenues for my cakes that I haven’t explored yet. Conclusion: I appreciate your time and I, along with many others I’m sure, feel you have an amazing talent, and honor the horror genre at the same time. Thank you for taking out some time to allow us a glimpse into your unique and creative world. With Halloween coming up, I’m sure you’re getting excited. |
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