Cakenstein Mask

This paper mache mask is the second in a series I'm calling 'Edible Horrors'. But don't try to eat them, it's a total lie.

Where do ideas come from? The Cookie Monster mask exists because I was working on a really specific Halloween costume at the same time that I watched a really specific movie. Maybe that's not a sexy answer, but I love the mask and I'm proud of the work I put into it. Now what about this mask?

The Cakenstein only exists because of the Cookie Monster. The Cookie Monster gave me a lot of laughs and I figured it would be good to enter into 'The Big', a regional art show that takes place here in town, every winter. I always like to participate in The Big, but the past two years I haven't been able to do so (simply because of the timing of commitments to other art shows),

Then I made the Cookie Monster, and there was still something like ten months of lead time, so I thought: I can put this in the show, and I can make more.

Typically, each artist who wants to participate in the The Big can submit up to three pieces for consideration, so all I had to do was make two more masks to go along with the Cookie Monster. I instantly knew what my theme had to be: Edible Horror.

Now, 'edible' is a bit general, but so far I'm focusing on dessert, because that's the best edible thing you can eat. So "Cakenstein" is that difficult second album. The sophomore novel. Will it match the raw power of the Cookie Monster? Will it be rushed? Soulless? Over-produced? Will I make the mistake of saying that the mask is bigger than Jesus?

Plaster gauze; newspaper and flour paste; scrap cardboard; duct tape; masking tape; paper clay; scissors and craft knife; paint; loofah

Honestly, I had no idea what this next mask should be. Edible Horror was the beginning and end of my mandate. What I did have was a schedule: my partner would soon be getting his second total shoulder replacement, and I would be taking two weeks off of work to help him through the early part of his recovery. Two weeks in which I would have an uncharacteristically large amount of unstructured time for making a mask.

Accordingly, I made the plaster gauze base for this mask, but without a plan. And while I was sitting there with gauze drying on my face, I took a few minutes to make one.

Back when I was making masks for the Missing Your Face show, I had a lot of ideas. Not all of them fit in with what I was doing for that show, but the elements of those unmade masks still existed in my notebooks. And in tiny pockets of my brain, where more useful information ought to be.

There had been a couple of different cake-based ideas that never got a chance to live! And cake, well, that was also edible. See where I'm going here? Cake. Monster. Mask.

By the time the plaster had dried, I had already decided to run with my first and most obvious idea! That's how all the best art is created. Make the first thing you thought of. Make Cakenstein.

Just saying the word "Cakenstein," however, doesn't design the monster. Before I got started with the build, I had to figure out some idea of what the Cakenstein actually was.

Our cultural consciousness has firmly embedded Jack Pierce's original makeup design into all of our minds. An extended forehead with a flat-topped skull is how we, as a people, signify the creature. To make my Cakenstein, I didn't want to veer too far from that visual language; a joke isn't really funny if people don't get it!

What I ended up with was something that I thought would be simple enough to 'read' in paper mache, while still selling the idea of Frankenstein's monster. It starts with a red velvet layer cake. Then, the blocky, familiar face of the monster is carved out of a four-layer carrot cake. The two cakes are stitched together using licorice ropes – the most edible of all suturing materials. Finally, the nose would be a separate hunk of red velvet cake.

Constructing the Cakenstein was pretty straightforward: after finishing the plaster gauze cast of my face (extending up to the top of my head), I placed the cured base onto one of my mannequin heads and started to build on top of it with cardboard.

I built out a large, square jaw for my monster, and the very nature of the cake would give him the correct head shape. Carving him a set of low-hanging brows that would put Herman Munster to shame, and a snarling mouth, completed his expression.

The whole face was just cardboard shapes, cut out and taped to the plaster base until I found an arrangement that worked. I should have taken more pictures of that process, but I was making the face while my partner was actually in surgery, and I had some heavy stuff on my mind.

I built very clear, chunky layers of cake, and then covered the whole mess with paper mache. It was right ugly at this stage, but I was still pretty sure that I could see what needed to happen.

At this point, there was a lot of work to be done, but I had a problem: I ran out of paper mache clay. This was my own gorram fault, but basically I had to wait several days for a shipment to arrive.

In the meantime, there was a little bit I could do: sections of the inside needed to be cut away and re-papered, and I was using up that last little bit of the last pound of clay on a few refinements to the face, but I couldn't do much in the way of reshaping the features yet. I couldn't put rich, gooey frosting between the layers, or crumby cakelike texture on the rest, without the clay.

I focused on structural details and reinforcements, and kicked myself a little.

Once the new clay arrived, I could finally test my theory. From the outset, I knew this mask wasn't really going to work unless I could do a decent 'cake' surface on the Cakenstein's face. To that end, I went to Bi-Mart and bought a natural loofah, which I sliced into a couple of shapes with a bread knife.

I began to soften large quantities of paper clay in water, then spread it in thin sheets across the cake surfaces of the mask. Then I used pieces of the loofah (still stiff) to press and scrape irregular shapes into the clay. It worked better than I had hoped.

Slicing the loofah into a wedge allowed me to get into all the weird little crannies in the face, and without a great deal of effort it made a convincing illusion.

Now I was also able to start shaping the layers of frosting in between the cakes, which pulls a lot of the shapes together and changes the whole character. Furthermore, frosting the bridge of the nose, above the brow, and across the cheeks, redefines the facial areas.

When I finalized my plan for where the red velvet cake would end, and the carrot cake would begin, I added in the seams.

The trick here is to do just enough work that the audience knows what they are seeing, but not so much that it becomes impossible to handle, or to paint.

We know what licorice ropes look like: they are an extruded noodle, with a number of raised ridges traveling along their infinite length in a gentle spiral pattern. In real life, there would be six or eight of those little devils on every strand of licorice, but I don't hate myself that much.

For each piece of licorice, I rolled out a small noodle of clay, keeping it nice and damp all the time, and then two (only two) smaller strands.

To create the licorice ropes, I brushed a thin layer of flour paste onto the thicker noodle, and affixed the skinny ones to either side. Holding this assemblage in my hand, I re-moistened it and then very gently began twisting it into a spiral. The clay has to be quite soft to do this without splitting it, so I wouldn't recommend trying to make a terribly long one by this method, but it worked well enough for two and three inch segments!

The licorice segments could just be put onto the mask, and then smashed into place with a small tool. I used clay tools because I have them, but a popsicle stick or spoon would be fine. Then I would build up the cake area surrounding them (see pictures), and re-texture it with the loofah, to complete the illusion.

It was time to start crowning this fellow, because the red velvet cake remained unfrosted! The idea here was to emphasize his dual nature by frosting only the red velvet cake on the top, leaving the carrot cake bare.

With all those elements in place, it was time to cut loose a bit. I built up the frosting, gave it thicker ripples, deeper texture, and sumptuous drips.

After some light sanding, followed by some more clay, and of course a few licorice ropes on the top, I'm starting to think... is this guy about ready? I did go in and cut out some material from inside, where my ears go, because as you can see from the picture it folds down my left ear. But basically, he was done.

When it came to the paint job, I knew I was in for a pretty intense process. At a glance you'd never notice, but this was going to require many layers, many colors, and a light touch. It all started with priming the cakes, and I differentiated the two flavors right from the start.

Umber base coat for the red velvet cake.

Sienna for the carrot cake.

The key for this step is to find my way into every tiny opening in those cakes, which is harder than it seems. So much harder that I would continue to find unpainted sections until... well, even still today while I am writing this Instructable. I try not to lose heart in those moments, because they are always part of this journey. And I've taken this journey once or twice before.

Not a lot of explicit instructions here; this is the part where I spend 14 hours just painting and painting and painting, layering different shades of siennas and reds, highlights and lowlights, trying to make paper mache look like cake. A lot of it is intuitive. It takes a long time because I don't always get it right, and so I keep going. I've never done this before, what do I know?

Once the cake seemed to be under control, I moved on to the licorice ropes. Naturally, they were all spattered with cake colors, so I started with the black licorice because I could just paint straight over it. I had originally intended to do it all with black licorice, but I decided that throwing in a couple of red vines would make the whole thing seem a little more...haphazard? I don't know. It felt right and I didn't question it.

To highlight the black licorice, I added titanium white of course, but cut it with some umber. Really waxy vines tend to be black through and through, but the nicer ones have a brown tint when you cut into them. I wanted to use the nice ones.

Meanwhile, I started the process of painting the frosting. Not because I was actually ready, but because I knew it was gonna take a while to figure out.

Both cakes have a dark crumb and are traditionally served with a cream cheese frosting, or a white buttercream. I fully intended to serve my cakes this way too; that contrast of light and dark was one of the reasons I chose them in the first place. But I also needed both frostings to look distinct, and I also knew from experience that painting something "white" usually does not mean anything of the sort.

As my experiments progressed, I found myself using darker and darker lowlights, and painting out the white that I had already used! Ultimately, the carrot cake frosting utilized a lot of yellow and sienna in the mix. The red velvet was frosted with a combination of primary blue and burnt umber, which sounds insane but somehow ended up being just what the doctor ordered.

For the red vines, I employed a completely different red. I was really nervous about the whole red-vines-against-a-red-velvet-cake thing. But the cake was painted with a blue based red, and the vines with a yellow based red, allowing them to really stand apart in a material way. No regrets after all.

What are the teeth? Are they fondant or something? I don't know. I feel like the teeth have the least amount of justification. They don't really contribute to the food aspect of the mask, only to the horror/monster aspect, so I have the least amount of confidence in the teeth. They felt necessary for the monster, but when I toyed with different ideas of more obviously edible teeth, it just seemed too busy.

I like the way they look, more or less. They're fine. But I don't know. If I was an art critic who hated me, and I was looking to tear me down, those teeth are where I would start.

I took a last round of photographs to help me identify problem areas. Some edge work needed done, where parts of the frosting overhangs the cake. Some highlights, where I needed to dial up the color of the frosting closer to pure white. But overall, things were looking good!

I consider this mask a successful realization of a vague and hasty vision I had. Probably better than it deserved to be, given those origins. Can it hold its own next to the Cookie Monster? We shall see. But the Cakenstein is not a failure.

The illusion of cake is convincing enough that my camera automatically categorized the pictures as 'dessert', which seems like a pretty nice thing for my phone to do for me. I'm also pleased with how well it wears, with the contours of my face. When it comes to wearing a carved layer cake on your head, you could do worse! I mean, if you can find one.