My Teen angst bullshit has a bodycount...
Oh YES, Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, collective readers of Confessions, I present for your reading/viewing delectation;
The Cigarette Burns First Annual Heathers Themed Halloween Bake-Off!
Wowzers!
I adore Christian Slater.
I adored him when I was a teenager and I still adore him today as a thirty year old baker.
Heathers is one of my favourite films ever. It was the first DVD I watched with the SIBF. It is one of the most trusted DVDs I own. It goes hand in hand with Reality Bites as the films you can always rely upon when you've got a bad dose of the mean reds.
The best thing about Heathers is that it just gets better and better the more times you watch it. The second best thing about Heathers is that Christian Slater and Winona Ryder are at their absolute coolest, and the third best thing about Heathers is that you can make damned good thematic cupcakes from its many iconic moments...
I put quite a lot of thought into these cakes. I resisted the temptation to watch the movie and make notes, knowing that the main part of the Cigarette Burns evening (run at The Mucky Pup by the super-cool Josh and Ed) would be watching the film on a big screen, so instead I thought about my favourite Heathers quotes. It goes without saying that in an ideal world I would have re-created the sight of JD and Veronica making out in a moonlit garden on a cupcake, but even I am more realistic than that, so I swiftly turned to my favourite lines from the film. For instance;
"I love my dead gay son."
I made basic vanilla cupcakes, iced them generously and prettily with vanilla and raspberry flavoured buttercream and then made the funnest ever tiny quote flags to stick in the cakes. There is something very pleasing about writing "Bulimia is so '87" and sticking it on a cupcake;
The next unavoidable topic when it comes to Heathers is death. So what better way to celebrate the film than with tombstone cupcakes dedicated to the dead members of Heathers! I couldn't fit Kurt's name on a tombstone hence he is omitted.
My SIBF had a go but...ummm...it wasn't up to the Silver Whimsy standards so we just left it with JD, Heather Chandler (H.C.) and Ram. These cakes were made by using chocolate buttercream icing on a vanilla cupcake and then adding a few sugar strands to look like grass (?!). The tombstones were made by icing cats-tongue style biscuits and then sticking them into the cake at a rakish angle. Super-fun! (Wow - the word 'rakish' is such a great word to use in relation to a tombstone don't ya think?)
The final Heathers themed cupcakes were based on the croquet colours and dress colour-codes that the Heathers and Veronica use.
(I put some flags on with their names for the sake of non-Heathers afficionadoes, and also because they added to the prettiness/fun factors. And because I am now clearly obsessed with making mini-flags.)
So those were the cakes! And here are real life members of the public tucking into a Veronica and HM cupcake respectively.
The man in the red had a beautiful dog called Tarka with whom SIBF, the amazing Sonja and I made friends. She was so lovely. In fact, there were no less than four dogs visiting The Mucky Pup during the course of Cigarette Burns. That's a fact, fact finders!
All in all, Cigarette Burns provided the most amazing, exciting, fun, free and un-expected evening's entertainment - especially when a mystery guest turned up and gave a kind of amazing music/spoken-word/hypnotically Lynchean performance with a band composed of Brechtian un-dead musicians including an accordionist - WOW!
I think I might take a bit of a break from baking for a while, as I kind of exhausted myself with the spookily friendly pumpkins and the many flags of Heathers (two whole days at the crafts table boys and girls!), but I will be back with more adventures from the frontline of coffee'n'cake very soon...
Until then,
Cupcakes and Kisses,
Silver Whimsy. x
