On the top of a dark and distant mountain
there is a beautiful and talented woman
who uses her unique skills of baking, sculpting and sewing
to create delicious confections
and hauntingly disturbing decor.
She finds beauty in the art of darkness with each creation
and shares them with us,
the unusual creatures she has taken into her home.
Join us in her delightfully dark world.
Welcome to The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell.
I want another one.
I'm not so sure, after what you did to poor Mr. Bailey here.
Well, I thought his skull would be full of candy.
- Alright, go ahead. - Yeah!
Ugh.
Slowly, you're gonna split another seam.
Rose, when you're done, would you help me in the kitchen?
- I think we're gonna have company soon. - Who's coming?
- Someone I sent for. - I hope it's Animal Control.
By the way, Rose is leaking all over the floor.
- Again. - No, that was already there!
Ugh. This place is a mess!
I can't live like this!
Rose, come along.
You should just seal up her mouth and solve all our problems.
And don't touch it.
I'm saving it for later.
Eurgh. I can assure you that won't be an issue. Animal!
So, what you making?
Your comment in the other room about the skull got me thinking about a treat
that you and our visitor might both like.
With Rose as your muse, I can only imagine what you have in mind.
- So, I take it you like skeletal remains? - Yeah.
- And chocolate and peanut butter? - Yeah.
Well, what would you say to me making peanut butter-filled pretzel bones
dipped in chocolate?
Peanut butter? Pretzels?
Chocolate?
Now if only she'd stay that way.
We've all had a late night guest
or a hungry little critter craving a bedtime snack,
but midnight is no time to get lazy
and the kitchen of the perfect hostess never sleeps.
Who is she talking to?
So, the recipe we're going to be making today
is comprised of simple ingredients
that you're either going to have in your home
or can gather with a quick trip to the supermarket.
So once you combine your creamy peanut butter,
good quality butter,
confectioners' sugar, as well as a very high-caliber vanilla,
with just a touch of salt,
you should end up with a mixture that's something like this.
You're going to be taking this sugary concoction
and using it as sort of a moldable clay,
that is very delicious.
So your first step is going to be making little balls.
If you do find that the mixture begins to stick,
it just means it needs a bit more confectioners' sugar.
So, ideally, each of the bones should have four little circular nubs at the end
with a pretzel rod running through it for strength.
For the outer layer of the pretzel,
you're gonna get a larger piece of your peanut butter dough.
Try to get it to a good consistency,
so it will hold and adhere to your pretzel rod.
Aah.
Using a rolling pin...
And that should give you a good initial coat of the pretzel rod.
And err on the side of this being a little too thin,
because not only will you be shaving it down,
but you'll be dipping it in chocolate,
and you really want the chocolate to build up
a decent amount of the body of the bone.
You can use the back of your nail to help sculpt some of these.
But really getting this first coat as smooth and nice as possible
is gonna help later down the road.
Once you get a shape that you like
and it's been nice and chilled in the freezer for a decent amount of time,
usually about two hours or until firm to the touch,
you're ready to start shaving it down
and preparing it to be dipped in molten chocolate.
So a potato peeler is going to be your best friend during this process
in smoothing out the bone.
Ooh. Very clever.
This is where sculpting tools really come in handy.
Getting everything as smooth and nice as possible in the peanut butter stage
is the safest way to end up with a really beautiful finished bone
that looks as good as possible.
Now, to temper your chocolate,
get about an inch of water,
place a bowl on top of it,
pour your chocolate in there
and temper it till it's nice and creamy and smooth
and the heat is well-circulated.
At this point, a whisk would be very helpful.
Millie, would you mind?
Oh. Thank you.
So now that the chocolate is just about the right temperature,
we're going to pour it into a bowl
that is just the right size to dip the bones into.
Fascinating.
I'm using a spoon to coat every inch of the bone, but you just need a thin layer.
Let's pop this back in the freezer for about 30 more minutes.
So now that we have the general shape that we're going for,
we're gonna continue sculpting it down,
just before painting and finalizing.
Keeping in mind the bone is the thinnest in the center.
You can smooth the nubs with the palm of your hand
to make sure you have a really beautiful finish.
Don't forget that realism is the goal of what you're doing.
So really taking your time and making sure you're replicating a realistic texture
is pretty key.
So, now that we have a pretty smooth sculptural shape,
we're going to do a couple little textures
with some sculpting tools, mainly pitting.
Which, if you look at any old, desiccated bone,
it's gonna have all these little grooves, pits,
and little tiny crevices, basically,
which I'm making by drilling into the bone using a potter's needle.
The final step will be to ever so lightly airbrush
a little bit of shadowing in the creases of the bone,
finishing by just doing a couple little streaks with some food coloring.
The last little touch we're gonna be doing
is with a fine point brush,
delicately filling all of those little pits that we did
to give as much realism as we can possibly achieve.
And there we are,
with a perfectly edible, delicious cookie bone.
And this should be perfect for the little monster in your life.
- Rose? - Yeah?
Would you like a cookie?
Yeah, I want a cookie!
Wha...
If you keep feeding her, she'll never leave.
I'll get it!
Mm, I better go make sure she doesn't attempt
to fornicate with whatever's there.
- Yes, you just keep eating that bone. - Mm.
Whoa!
You poor thing!
I'm dying.
Kill me.
There we go.
There's a note around his neck.
I'll read it.
It's upside-down.
"Do not feed him fish"?
"Don't feed him flesh."
Well, that makes sense.
Whoa!
Edgar, there's no need to be frightened.
He stinks.
Coming from you, that really says something.
All right, that's enough, you two. He's been through a lot.
So... he's a what now?
To be honest, I'm not really sure.
But his name's Edgar, and I don't think we need to worry ourselves over labels.
- How do you know all of this? - Good heavens, it talks!
She just knows stuff, okay?
And if she or I see you get one step out of line,
there's an incinerator in the basement that will burn you alive.
You will do no such thing.
I apologize for Rose, introductions are not really her strong suit.
Indeed, her talents include binging on trash
and an insatiable libido with the neighborhood dogs.
The heart wants what the heart wants.
What is this place?
This is our home, and it's a place where the strange, unusual...
- and Rose... - Yeah!
Are safe and welcome.
Our kind is protected here.
Yeah, I was crushed in a garbage truck and she remade me, better.
What about you, squirrel? She make you also?
I am a cat!
And resurrected would be more accurate.
He really was rather pitiful when I met him.
Just wasting away on a shelf.
I was once revered as a god, until some jealous humans
buried me alive and cursed me.
Yes, later I was stolen from my tomb and wound up in an antique shop.
Christine was good enough to accurately read the spell on my burial cloth,
and now...
here we are.
You may worship me if you like.
You talk too much.
All right, you guys, that's enough chatter.
Edgar, I have a surprise for you.
- Come this way. - Hm.
It's okay. You're fine. Come here.
Have a seat.
Alright, you won't be needing this anymore.
I'll be back in just a moment.
Rose, Rankle.
Please make our guests feel at home.
Yeah, we'll have so much fun, and we'll play games
and sing songs and...
Listen, pal!
I don't know what your deal is,
but don't plan on stayin' long, if you get what I mean.
You smell like a zoo.
Hah! On a good day!
She actually bathed this month.
Yeah!
- All right, Edgar. - Huh?
I made these earlier, just for you.
You...
made these?
I did. It's just peanut butter and chocolate.
- Dig in. - Yeah, dig in.
Chocolate kills dogs.
He'll be fine, white chocolate isn't the same thing.
Oh, delightful.
Does it need a drool bucket too?
Oh, he's just got a healthy appetite.
Edgar, I think it's time for bed.
We still need to find you a place to sleep. Want to come with me?
- Yeah. - Okay, come on.
Rose, Rankle,
no murder plots tonight.
Be sure to floss.
Oh! What?
Oh, marvelous. Just what we need in this house.
Another mouth-breathing brainless beast to feed.
Does she not understand that I require silence
to maintain my mastery of creation?
Oh, he'll be much quieter when I'm through with him.
Really? What do you have in mind?
Somethin' awful.
Do you think a funeral would be a little bit more appropriate?
A welcoming party sounds stupid.
Don't be silly, this is Edgar's new home.
I'm just saying, I think he'd probably be a lot more comfortable
six feet underground.
Everyone would be more comfortable if you were six feet under too.
I was once, it didn't take.
I don't think a trash compactor counts as a grave.
In the ground, mangled in a garbage truck, what's the difference?
My point is, this place is crowded enough.
I can't argue with that.
Will you two pipe down? Or you're gonna wake up Edgar
and ruin the surprise.
What's the surprise?
I'm going to make a cake in the shape of our house for him
with little miniature Edgars in front.
I still think murder's a better surprise.
It always catches people off-guard. Ugh,
Making a cake for a new friend
is the perfect way to show them that you care.
And if they can survive this amount of butter and sugar,
you should have a friend for life.
- Who is she talking to? - I told you, she's a little mad.
Fortunately, she has us to look after her.
Agreed.
When taking on a project of this magnitude,
buttercream is going to be your very best friend.
You're also going to need some additional supplies to build up your structure.
Finally, since it's cake, I've added a few fun details.
I've been working on the exterior frame of the house for some time now.
When you have something so heavy, you'll want to support it
with things like dowel rods, cake board,
probably every, I want to say four to five inches, at least.
So you can build up those layers.
Otherwise, you're going to build up something humongous
and it is going to collapse on you.
Which is not what you want!
So, obviously, the basis of a tall, structural cake like this
starts with some pretty basic ingredients.
The body of this house began with some 13 by nine-inch chocolate sheet cakes.
It's easier to work with smaller sections.
So cut these big cakes in half and work with the smaller pieces.
For a cake like this, you wanna keep those pieces pretty thick and big.
So you should cut this in half again and then cut it into two layers,
so you can frost in between,
which becomes the bulk of the house you see here.
Then you'll add a crumb coat over the whole cake, like I did here.
So once it gets to this stage,
you really wanna keep it chilled as much as possible,
so we're gonna pop this back in the fridge.
And because this is my house,
we're going to add some eyeballs in the front.
Ooh! Maybe she'll make me a butterscotch pyramid one day.
So, when I make eyeballs with any of my baking,
I always use white modeling chocolate as the base for the eyeball.
So I kind of guesstimate how big I want these eyeballs to be,
roll out what I think is gonna be two of them,
cut it in half.
So then you know you have equal quantities of your chocolate for each ball.
So there you have two eyeballs that should be roughly the same size.
Now I'm going to show you how to paint them.
I have food-grade powder pigments,
a little bit of vodka to sort of liquefy those paints,
and the reason vodka is so useful
is because it evaporates very quickly and your paint will stay in place.
You can do an iris as a circle,
but for my house, I think I want something a little creepier,
and nothing is scarier than a cat's eye.
Ooh, it's like glaring into a mirror.
So that's one down, one left to go.
But before I get into that,
I think I wanna show you about eyelids and how they work.
Most of the expression of the eye is created with the eyebrow and the eyelid.
And the direction of that
sort of influences whether this character either looks angry,
happy, sad or cute.
By tilting the lid of the eyeball, I've given it a menacing expression.
I'm using brown modeling chocolate.
So that's sort of a base or beginning.
So I'll continue building up the folds of skin around the eye
to increase the menace
and anger that you see in the eye.
- What do you guys think? - Oh, that's very clever.
- It's beautiful! - Yes.
So, when you begin decorating your cake,
it's really the textures that are gonna make all the difference in the world.
Going through with a blade
and cutting in slats into your buttercream
can give the appearance of wood, so when you go in and paint it,
everything should look perfect and beautiful and seamless.
So once you have your borders and perimeters sort of set out,
you just need to create your first line of shingles
and then follow behind them
and just repeat that pattern all the way until you hit the top.
If you're unsure about your pattern,
it's always useful to sample it out first on a flat surface.
If you make a huge mistake,
you can usually scrape it up,
but if the mistake is small, I mean, at the end of the day, it's cake.
And now it's time to work on the windows.
Now that I have outlined where those windows are gonna be,
I'm gonna carve out some of the buttercream that I've put in
so I have a little bit of a hollow casing
that I can go around with with some trim and flashing.
The cake still needs shingling, and you start at the bottom.
Pipe that continually, over and over and over again.
And the same with the shingles on the roof,
which I've airbrushed brown.
Then, once this is completely dry,
it was ready to be painted.
I made a very runny royal icing.
You can just not quite put in as much confectioners' sugar
and just keep adding water until it's just right.
Sometimes, before you tackle the actual cake itself,
it's good to practice any decorative elements that you wanna apply to it.
So you get the kinks worked out before you actually start adhering things
to this masterpiece that you've created.
So, obviously, quite a few hours later,
we have something that looks like this.
I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, this is tedious and time-consuming.
But once you get it to this stage,
it begins to turn into something you're very, very proud of
and excited to share with people.
So, the last step is to apply clear piping gel
to the eye to give it a wet, realistic look.
Try and pipe your gel evenly over the eyeballs
and don't be afraid to take your time.
After applying your initial coat,
spread the gel with a paintbrush.
So now it's going back to the chiller for tonight's party.
Okay, we're all done with that.
Ooh! Can we eat it now?
No, it's for tonight.
- Aww. - But we still have one last project to do.
Edible Edgars.
Ugh. Well, I hope it tastes better than it sounds.
Are we certain that Edgar has his flesh-eating habit under control?
To be honest, I'm not entirely sure.
So, to be on the safe side...
let's make sure he never tastes blood again.
Okay, so he'll just stay here, with us...
who are chock-full of blood!
Great! Perfection. Makes total sense.
Our last project of the day is going to be
these cereal tree creatures made from puffed rice cereal,
marshmallow, a little bit of butter, salt and vanilla.
And I've actually made a much larger one
that I want to show you all the fine finishing details.
Obviously, this little guy is a few further steps ahead.
I've airbrushed him with some food coloring,
and then applied little individual coconut hairs,
glued on with some chocolate royal icing,
and then just piped on a few little nuggets of royal icing,
just to bulk him up a little bit and give him some texture.
So now, one last coat of airbrushing,
and then he will be ready for eyes and teeth and claws.
Molding the sculpture was easy,
as puffed rice treats are very pliable.
All right, all done and ready for those finishing details.
So for the final touch, I'm going to pipe white royal icing into the eyes...
onto the fingers...
and onto the mouth...
just to sort of imply eyes, teeth and claws.
All right, all done.
- What do you think? - Mm.
My followers used to make little replicas of me out of the purest gold.
They would pray to them, most fervently.
Some of those sculptures still exist.
Really?
Why don't you go find one and pray to it that you meet someone who cares?
Well, this only needs to make it through tonight.
I'm gonna go finish setting up for the party in the dining room.
Okay, bye.
That cookie isn't the only thing in this house that's gonna be expiring soon.
- You mean you're gonna kill Edgar, right? - Yeah.
What do you guys think?
It's perfect... except... Huh.
What's that spot over there?
- Where? - Over there, in the corner.
This?
And now I'll frost you with rat poison.
- What don't you like? - Oh, nothin'.
It was just a shadow.
That's a lot of sugar for one table.
What do you think the odds are Edgar's diabetic?
- Oh... - Did somebody say my name?
He's got a gun!
No, Rose!
Oh, Rose.
Edgar, I'm sorry about that. We had planned a surprise for you.
- What's that under your arm? - Huh?
Uh... Oh, um...
You've been so... sweet,
letting me live in your house and welcoming me into your family.
I wanted to do something nice for you.
So I made this.
I hope you like it.
Oh, my God.
I hope you don't mind,
I used some paints I found in a corner under the stairs,
right next to where I pee.
Edgar, you are so talented. I...
- This is amazing. - Hm.
- Derivative. - It's not that great.
Rose, look! He even captured your eyes!
Mm, and the crust around them.
Um, okay, are we all forgetting that I almost died?
- How? - I was almost crushed by the cake!
Luckily, you survived. And luckily...
I always make a backup.
I'll be back in a jiff.
Way to go. You ruined everything!
Yeah, I tend to do that a lot.
Oh, yes. Yes, howl, you magnificent beast.
The cruel universe is indifferent to your suffering.
Ooh, cake.
Edgar, welcome to your new home.
Come here and give me a hug.
Ugh.
- Oh, that's too much. - Eurgh.
"Keep it down, freaks."
Oh, the neighbors. Ugh!