Our (edible) Tooth Child will make you SHUDDER!

About two weeks ago I got an email from AMC and Shudder asking me if I’d be interested in doing a collaboration with them.  Now before we go any further, let me tell you a bit about Shudder, starting with the fact that they’re an online streaming platform dedicated to horror, thriller and suspense shows…so a perfect fit, right?!

Shudder was getting ready to launch all 4 installments of Channel Zero, starting with Candle Cove on the 9th of August, and would I be interested in coming up with something fun to help them kick this whole event off? For those of you who don’t know what Channel Zero is, it’s a horror anthology television series based off of creepypasta stories.  Even if you’re not familiar with Channel Zero, but have spent any time online in recent memory, you’re probably familiar with one of their most iconic horror creations so far, the Tooth Child…otherwise known as this monstrosity:

Of course, with my love of all things disgustingly delicious, I was immediately on board! “Great,” they said.  “What about using your In-dentured gelatin recipe?” Now, I could have said yes at this point and made life SO easier on myself, but why use a recipe that’s already been done?  Why not do something insanely difficult and over the top? “What if I made a cake of the Tooth Child instead?” “You can do that?”   “Of course.  I mean, how hard could it be?  It’s just a bunch of teeth.” And with that simple sentence, I damned myself to tooth-purgatory for two weeks. Now before we go much further, this isn’t going to be my usual recipe post where I tell you exactly what you’ll need and then walk you through how to make your own version of what I’ve made.  Yes, you could easily pull out what I did here and recreate your own Tooth Child, but for the sake of your kitchen and your sanity, I suggest you don’t. The first thing I did was download a ton of photos of The Tooth Child.  Between printing them out and leaving them in random spots for my coworkers to find (the fridge and in the cabinet in the bathroom were the two winners for scares) I spent some serious time looking at it and trying to figure out exactly how I was going to pull this off. I figured I was going to need teeth.  A LOT of teeth.  I picked up a set of teaching teeth from Amazon and had them rush shipped to me along with a package of food safe molding putty.  I figured if I could mold them, I could make them much faster than if I was rolling each one by hand.

Once the teeth got here, I popped the incisors and canines off the velvet card they were glued to (so fancy!) and set about molding them.  I figured I’d use just those two types of teeth as they looked the most like the teeth the Tooth Child is covered in.  Plus, with one long pointy root, they’d be a lot easier to insert into whatever I decided to use as a base for this adventure.

Because it dries rock hard but is a lot like malleable edible clay, I figured making the teeth out of gum paste was going to be the easiest way for me to make the hundreds of teeth I’d need for this project…not to mention the fact that the stuff is called, well…gum paste. Once I’d managed to make four molds of the individual teeth I wanted and picked up two tubs of gum paste, I set about making as many of these teeth as I could. I found I could roll a small ball of gum paste and then press it into the mold.  I’d leave it and continue doing the same with more gum paste and the remaining molds and by the time I had filled all four with gum paste, the first mold was ready to pop out.  A few pinches of my fingers and a quick roll of the end of the root into a point and I had a finished gum paste tooth ready to dry.

The entire process took about 2 minutes, meaning, if I focused, I could make 20 teeth every 10 minutes, or about 120 an hour. Unfortunately, having a day job means I only get about an hour or two a night to dedicate to tooth making…so I buckled down and started molding as fast as I could, finally ending up with just under 1000 in 5 days.

For my first attempt on this project (did I tell you it took two tries?!  It did.) I though I’d use a red velvet cake as my base, because what’s cooler than slicing into a 1:1 ratio Tooth Child?  That’s right, slicing into one and revealing a blood red center.

I whipped up a double batch of red velvet and baked half in my skull cake pans and half in a round cake pan.

I knew, based on the fact that I used 2 lbs of gum paste that the teeth were going to be heavy, so I figured I’d need a substantial cake base for this project.  I built one on a 1.5’X1.5′ board using 1/2 inch steel pipe and then covered the whole thing in tin foil (for food safety.) I made a base of rice cereal treats to add some strength to the cake and then started piling on the red velvet.

Now I should probably tell you that during this whole adventure, Idaho (where I currently am) was in the middle of the hottest temperature streak we’ve had in years.  The day I did my first attempt on this cake, it was 113F at the hottest and by the time I started baking at 8pm, it was still 95F.

Hot temperatures and cake don’t work well…and if you look closely at the photo above, you can see the right side of his jaw already starting to slide.  This photo was taken around 10 pm when the temperatures outside finally fell to a balmy 90F.  Inside, our AC was struggling just to keep it below 85F. Undaunted, and a bit cocky, I kept pushing forward, alternately working on the cake and stashing it in the freezer in an attempt to keep it from completely falling apart. I gave my red velvet a thick crumb coat, wrapped the whole thing up in a batch of white marshmallow fondant and started setting teeth. At Midnight I knew I was in trouble.

This cake was doomed to fail from the very beginning.  As you can see in the photo, between the hot temperatures and the weight of the teeth, the red velvet just wasn’t strong enough to hold up, even with the added internal structure of the pipe and a few wooden skewers for good measure. At 12:30 am, the inevitable happened:

Back to square one. I pulled out as many teeth as I could and scrapped the rest.

Time for round two. Because it’s still hot as hell, I wasn’t taking any chances with cake and decided for this version, we’re going for structural integrity over aesthetics and I switched to rice cereal.

Three bags of marshmallows, a 1/2 cup of butter and 2 boxes of rice cereal later, we had the base of our Tooth Child.  And believe me when I tell you…this bastard is SOLID.

Because the buttercream I used the first time was prone to melting so easily with the hot weather, I decided for this round to use a much stiffer royal icing frosting bulked up with some super stiff egg whites to help glue the fondant to my underlying rice cereal structure.

I also made changes to the fondant I used.  Because I wasn’t happy with how the white fondant looked on my first try, I switched to black marshmallow fondant. I liked how the black between the white of the teeth gave the project more depth. To help keep the black from becoming too overwhelming, however, I knew at the end I’d give the whole thing a wash in white airbrushed food coloring.

Now it was time to start adding teeth!  Luckily for me, the hot streak had finally broken and the temperatures had dropped to a more tolerable mid-90s (but it was still damn hot, which is why all these photos are no longer being taken in the kitchen but are now in the basement laundry room where the AC is always on overdrive.)

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Working from photos I found online, I started pushing teeth through both the fondant and the frosting, stabbing them deep into the cereal treat body beneath.

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Finally, after what seemed like a million hours and teeth…

The Tooth Child was finished. To give it that shiny, realistic gloss, I airbrushed it with a mixture of vodka, white food coloring, and light corn syrup.

This beast is over 2 feet tall, weighs almost 20 pounds, is covered with close to 1000 teeth (that’s 2lbs of gum paste alone), and has officially been banned from the office (cowards). So I’m eating it. Alone. And it’s delicious. To celebrate this monstrosity and testament to questionable taste in tooth inspired treats, Shudder is giving us ALL a free 30-day trial to their streaming services!  Just use the code EATTHEDEAD and check out the Channel Zero: Candle Cove Tooth Child episode for yourself!