Halloween let’s us all be kids – we can dress up in costumes, play tricks in the way of frightful yard decorations, and then there are the treats – with more and more kids staying in for Halloween parties instead of roaming the streets,

Halloween cakes are becoming a very important part of the night’s festivities.

Here are some frightfully fun and easy Halloween cake ideas.

Kids will go batty over our haunted house cakes (and with these easy tips, you won’t!), and Frankenstein’s Bride doll cake will bring Halloween chills to the table.

Haunted House – Sheet, Novelty Pan or Sculpted Castle

The variations on this Halloween cake are as unlimited as your imagination.

You can create towers with ice-cream cones, turned upside down and iced, or iced paper towel rolls (trimmed to fit proportionally to your cake).

Then pipe on decorations.

Confectionary towers can be created like this: Cut out round shapes from a pound cake that has been baked in a jellyroll pan (but not rolled).

Then run a bamboo skewer through the uniform, round pieces of cake to form a tower. Stick the tower into the cake, ice and decorate. Don’t make them so tall that they topple! For placement ideas, check Google Images for “castle cakes.”

Have fun with the details. This is the trick to creating a cake that will captivate everyone’s interest. Before icing a tower, you could cut out a window, and then tuck inside a kooky poltergeist or other ghoulish figure that you’ve modeled with marzipan, molded with gum paste or bought from a store.

How about a moat? Decorating gel makes convincing water. Add a three-headed monster to guard the moat, and then tuck green miniature lights under the drawbridge and behind the turrets for more Halloween cheer!

If you’re looking for confectionary tools or molds for your Halloween cake creatures, you’ll find plenty at Candyland Crafts

Here’s a tip about your figures: Gum paste creations will dry hard and last a long time, and due to the bland taste, they are best saved and not munched.

Marzipan tastes great, but it’s expensive, and the taste may be a bit unusual for most kids. So, you may want to bypass these two and use Rolled Buttercream.

Halloween Doll Cake – Go Vintage with Frankenstein’s Bride

We spun this creepy cake design off from the doll cakes, the ones created with Barbie dolls and confectionary dresses.

For the Halloween version, create Frank’s ghoul friend with a raven-doll. Using a comb, tease her hair so it puffs up high (like in the old movie posters) and then paint the skunk stripes up each side.

Paint her face a pasty white, add eye make up, startling eyebrows, and dark red or blue lipstick. For ideas, search online for “Bride of Frankenstein.”

The cake dress might be trimmed, so it’s not quite as Cinderella puffy, and then covered with white buttercream (to resemble her 1935 negligee). If you can do lace impressions, all the better! For a more spooky fashion, adorn with a black spider.

Vintage 60’s Halloween Doll Cake Idea: Fashion a doll cake after the Addams Family’s gothic mom, Mortisha! A search online will bring up lots of pictures.

Our Halloween doll design ideas are variations of the doll cake how-to’s in “Cake Decorating Made Easy!” Here’s what one reader had to say about our Video Books.

“If you are new to decorating or an old pro, you’ll learn something new and helpful from these books. They are WONDERFUL!!!”

Thelma Gonzales, Tucson, Arizona

Collecting ideas for Thanksgiving yet? Check out our Thanksgiving Day Cake Design Ideas.

And, our last tip from our Halloween goody bag of tips and tricks: Due to the bitterness of food coloring, eating icing with dark, Halloween colors can be frightful.

If you want your Halloween red, brown and black icings to taste as sweet as the icings that require less coloring, try these suggestions: