In the fine tradition of this blog, here’s your Halloween cut-up cake. This witch cut-up cake is made from one 9×9 square cake. Just make a few clever cuts and rearrange the pieces, and you have an adorable cackling witch!

This is an adaptation of the original Baker’s cut-up cake “Hallo Witch” from 1956. I’ve changed a few of the proportions from the original to make her look a bit more balanced. The decorating is also updated, but feel free to decorate yours any way the fancy strikes. The original used coconut flakes for the hair, and there’s another Baker’s version that uses coconut flakes for the both the hair and the hat.

The 1956 version:

To keep your cutting in line, I’ve created a printable you can lay over the cake and cut through. I am the worst at freehanding, and I figure there have to be a few more like me out there somewhere!

The other great part of this cake is that it only takes half a cake mix. I turned my other half into an adorable spiderweb cake (I’ll post this next week), but you could also use it to make cupcakes.

You can also use any cake recipe and decorating icing you’d like. I’ll drop my doctored cake mix and decorator’s buttercream recipes here. They’re my favorite!

Witch Cut-Up Cake, Step by Step

Materials

• 1 9×9 cake
• knife
• printable cutting template
• icing tinted brown (or just chocolate), green, orange, and white
• Wilton tips 18, 4, 1M, and 12
• 4 piping bags
• cake board (mine’s half a diaper box covered in foil)

Instructions

Start with your baked cake and your cutting template. You’ll need a sharp, straight-edge knife. Serrated makes more crumbs and a less clean cut.

Lay the template over the cake, then cut through the paper to create three pieces. You can remove the template after you’re done cutting.

Next, you’ll arrange them on your cake board. The face piece stays oriented the same. The nose piece is placed towards the top of the long uncut side of the face with the slant edge going down. The hat piece goes in the middle of the long cut side. This is what it looks like:

Doesn’t bear much resemblance to a witch yet, right? That’s where the decorating comes in. Feel free to decorate any way you’d like, but if you’re sticking with me, get ready to pipe some stars!

I started by lining off a section of the big piece for the hat brim. Using my #18 tip and a piping bag, I made a line of chocolate stars about 1 inch from the top edge, then filled that in. I continued up the pointy part of the hat to finish off the hat.

Still using chocolate, I switched my tip for a #4 and sectioned off a piece of the center for the face. You can see the line in the photo above. I left a little room at the top for her hair to peek out from under the brim of the hat.

Next, I made a circle for the eye right on level with the nose.

I filled this in with the #18 tip and white and chocolate frosting.

Next, I filled her entire face in with green stars. I actually moved the nose away from the face, filled in the face, then moved the nose back and filled it in to match.

I switched my chocolate bag to the #12 tip and piped a small dot on her nose for a wart.

The last major part of this is done with the orange icing and the 1M tip. I did her hair by making uneven swirls with the 1M all over the remaining un-iced area.

The final finishing touch is the mouth. I used the #4 tip to pipe a slight curve (I wanted a smiley witch). Et voila! She’s done!

The decorating took me about 45 minutes from start to finish, and I love the way she turned out!

Looking for more Halloween cakes? Check these out!

Don’t forget to pin!