This black Halloween cake is spooky, chocolatey and sure to impress

When you think of Halloween, visions of dressing up in costumes and trick-or-treating for free candy may immediately come to mind. But maybe you’re the cool house in the neighborhood that hosts a Halloween party for friends and family.

We found a cake recipe as dark as a spooky night that will set the mood for a Halloween party. Plus, it will have dessert-lovers screaming over its scary goodness thanks to its deep chocolate flavor, purple frosting and the adorable meringue ghosts on top.

Recipe creator Lisa from My Incredible Recipes writes on her blog that this cake’s unusual black-and-purple frosting creates an “eerie yet enticing appearance,” and we couldn’t agree more. She also posted an image to her Facebook page:

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This from-scratch cake uses standard pantry ingredients. It looks fancy, but her directions are easy to follow and leave a lot of room for creativity with the decorations.

The ingredients you will need to make this Halloween Ghost Cake include flour, unsweetened cocoa powder, three kinds of sugar, whole milk, eggs, sour cream, vanilla, coffee and food coloring. You’ll also need cream of tartar for the meringue ghosts.

You might be wondering, why coffee? Expert bakers often recommend adding coffee to chocolate dessert recipes to bring out the best flavors. The bitterness of coffee balances out the sweetness of the chocolate and creates a more complex, intense flavor.

In this case, the recipe calls for hot coffee. Other recipes will use ground, instant coffee. Either way, the small addition dramatically affects the final chocolate cake.

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The step-by-step directions will take a while to follow, because this cake has multiple decorations. It requires making and frosting a regular three-layer cake, complete with food coloring to create the dark hues. The most time-consuming part of this recipe is making the meringue ghosts, but only because they require a couple of hours in the oven at a low temperature once you have whisked the egg whites to stiff peaks and then piped them into their ghostly shapes.

Get the full recipe for this Halloween cake at My Incredible Recipes.

This cake will be a showstopper for any Halloween event and worth the effort to make. We think it’s likely to become a new holiday tradition!