Dead Velvet Cake

52weeksofcooking 2026 - Week 24 - Tarot

Like a gremlin, there are certain things that I shouldn’t do after midnight: Have another cup of coffee, play videogames, or, it turns out, make decisions about the cake I’m baking. It’s only as the witching hour approaches that questions like “why not four layers?” begin to sound reasonable.

I grew up in the slightly hallucinatory shadow of the oncoming millennium. The X-Files on TV, thumbing through an issue of Fortean Times. I have no personal belief in the power of a pack of cards to divine the future, but I own several tarot decks, because even though I’m a sceptic, I really enjoy occult aesthetics. It feels like home. And what could be more occult than the Death card?

Maybe it’s true though, and you shouldn’t play around with mystical forces you don’t understand, because the construction of my cake was beset with difficulties. I struggled, I moved through disaster. And I was reborn as a baker, with a completed cake that was almost what I’d envisioned.

What I wanted to make was this: Red velvet, blackberry compote, blackberry cream cheese frosting, chocolate ganache, white chocolate skull decoration, fresh blackberries. However, my delivery from the supermarket substituted half of my blackberries with blueberries and it turns out that cream cheese frosting really doesn’t want to be stable when you make it with British spreadable cream cheese and then dope it with blueberry coulis.

Also, this was my second ever cake and it turns out that I’m not very good at scaling recipes, so I ended up with twice as much cake batter as I expected and instead of splitting it into two, I simply poured it all into the same tin and then wondered why my cake took two hours to bake. Surprisingly, it came out pretty much perfect. Once the edges were trimmed, the remaining cake was still moist with the beautiful texture you’d expect from a velvet cake.

Still, with twice the cake, it seemed obvious to simply double the number of layers. Surely four layers could be no more difficult than two. Just taller, right?

For the cake, I used Stella Parks recipe from the cookbook BraveTart. This combines red wine and natural cocoa powder to achieve a reddish tint. It turns out that natural cocoa powder is pretty hard to find, so I ended up using my regular Dutch process organic cocoa, which tastes great, but doesn’t react with the acidic wine to give quite the same colour effect.

My blueberry compote was simply blueberries, sugar and enough time and heat for it to stop being runny. I passed a couple of tablespoons of this through a sieve to make a coulis for my blueberry cream cheese frosting, but there was no trace of frosting left at the end. I think the cake may simply have absorbed it overnight. The ganache was from Sally’s Baking Addiction, but I added quite a lot of black food dye to get it as dark as possible. It still wasn’t a true black, but it was dark enough for the white chocolate skull to look cool, and that was what I mostly cared about.

I made the white chocolate skull by laying acetate over my phone and tracing a picture of a skull in tempered white chocolate. The white chocolate had a tendency to close up the spaces I left for the eye and nose holes, so there was a bit of sculpting afterwards with a variety of hot cutlery.

This feels like it was wildly ambitious for a second cake, but it mostly worked and I’ve certainly learned a lot from the attempt! I finished assembling the thing at 2 in the morning and we ate it the next day. I still think that blackberry compote would have worked better than the blueberry, but the jam-like compote and the rich, velvety cake worked fantastically together. Did I need the cream cheese frosting? Probably not, but I’d have liked some more colour contrast in the cake, so if I were to make it again, I’d go with the annoying-to-make, but very reliable Swiss meringue buttercream.

This was fun. People always say that baking is more of a science than savoury cooking, but for me baking is wild decisions at too late an hour. It’s doubling the layers on a whim, hands covered in ganache and tongue stained grey from the food dye.

It’s the occult.

It’s a cake that stared back at you with empty eye sockets.

It’s an incantation that transforms ingredients into something a bit magical, and as you cut the first slice, you realise, it’s not only the ingredients that have been transformed.