Sweet Bleeding Heart Cake

Bake a different type of cake for each organ. Here are the cake-sauce combinations I used:

• Heart — Orange cake with raspberry sauce
• Lungs — Apple spice cake with strawberry sauce
• Kidneys — Orange cake with blueberry sauce
• Stomach — Ginger cake with mango sauce
• Small intestine — Jellyroll with red currant jelly

But don’t add any of the sauces while baking — these will be added later.

Once these cakes are baked and cooled, carve them into the shapes of the appropriate organs. Gray’s Anatomy makes a very handy reference.

Flip each organ over, hollow out a cavity in the center, and frost the inside of the cavity and the underside of the cake with butter cream frosting. Then spoon in the fruit sauces. Roll out some of the fondant and seal the cavities with it. Flip the organs back over.

Cover the organs with fondant icing. (You could also use white modeling chocolate, which tastes better and sticks to itself better than fondant. But it’s more difficult to work with on cakes like these, which are relatively unstable due to the hollows in the middle. Also, modeling chocolate is difficult to paint with paste food coloring, though it can be painted easily with powdered food coloring dissolved in cocoa butter.)

Put your cakes aside, and assemble the white chocolate rib cage in which all the organs will be placed. First I drew the ribs on paper, which I placed underneath the acetate to guide me. Then, temper the white chocolate by zapping it very briefly in the microwave, and pipe the ribs and vertebrae onto acetate with a plastic piping bag. Wait until firm.

Now dip each piece into a bowl of melted white chocolate before assembling the rib cage on a silver tray. Of course, with all the organs on top of it, no one ever actually sees that there is a complete spinal column underneath all the cake, but I say if you’re going to make an edible, anatomically correct chest cavity dessert tray, you might as well do it right!

Once the rib cage is dry, place all the organs into the cage in their appropriate places, again using Gray’s Anatomy as a guide.

Before attaching the intestine, bend the jelly roll into appropriate curves and cover it with fondant.

Move the cake to its final resting place, and then place the intestine. It should trail out of the rib cage, suggesting that the person to whom the thorax had belonged has been ripped apart, rather than carefully dissected.

I’m not really sure what colors kidneys and stomachs are supposed to be, but drawing on my vast experience watching people in movies being disemboweled, I gave it my best shot. Have fun with it.

All that’s left is to add the butter cream frosting blood, so it doesn’t look so pristine.

I did little veins on the organs first with a piping bag, then put big globs of gore on the ribs with a knife. A little spritz of corn syrup to give it that all-important oozing, wet look, and voilà! You’re done!