Halloween Marble Cake

Preheat the oven to 180 °C convection and grease three loaf tins. Cream the soft butter with sugar and vanilla sugar in the stand mixer until the mixture is light and fluffy.

Add the eggs one at a time and mix each one in fully before adding the next. This way the butter absorbs the egg without curdling, and the cake will have a fine crumb.

Mix the flour and baking powder and sift them over the batter. Fold in the flour and milk alternately, only briefly, until the batter is smooth. Mixing for too long makes the sponge tough, and the shapes will be harder to cut out later.

Divide the batter into three equal portions. One stays white and goes into the first tin. Colour the other two boldly with gel color in orange and purple. Use more colour than seems right: it becomes lighter in the oven, and next to the dark cocoa batter the shapes should stand out.

Fill the orange and the purple batter into the other two tins, smooth the surface and bake all three cakes for 45 minutes at 180 °C convection. Do the skewer test and let them cool completely, ideally overnight: cold cake won't crumble when cut.

Remove the cakes from the tins and cut them into 2 cm thick slices. You'll need the white cake tin again straight away: wash it out, dry it and grease it again.

Cut one motif out of each slice: ghosts from the white cake, pumpkins from the orange cake, bats from the purple cake. Lay them in rows the length of the tin, close together. That way you'll find all three in every slice later.

Put the cake scraps into a tin: this is how we make our monster balls, small cake balls shaped as a pumpkin, witch, spider and mummy.

Stir the cocoa batter just like the light batter and add the cocoa together with the flour.

Spread a thin layer of cocoa batter on the bottom of the tin. Place the first row of motifs in it and cover them with cocoa batter so they sit firmly. Then add the second and third rows, each time with cocoa batter in between. Feel free to offset the rows slightly and at different heights, so every slice looks different.

Cover everything with the remaining cocoa batter and smooth it out. Pipe a thin strip of soft butter lengthwise down the middle. The cake will then split right there, instead of bulging somewhere and shifting the motifs.

Bake the cake at 180 °C convection for 45 minutes and let it cool completely.

Bring the whole cream and butter to the boil, pour both over the chopped couverture, leave it to stand for a minute and stir to a smooth ganache. Let it set until it can be piped, then pipe it in stripes onto the cake.

Mix the Hüppen flakes with the cocoa. Sprinkle the "earth" onto the still soft ganache and press it on lightly so it sticks.

Finally, place mushrooms, ghosts, pumpkins and sprinkle decor on the earth, exactly as you like.