What: “a chocolate mint cake, with white icing with red and black on it and spy butterflies”, for Kid 7’s spy themed birthday party. It was the final prize in their secret agents mission.
We went through quite a few variations of what it would be, actually. The original plan was to have one of those printed-icing things with the cover of one of the EJ Spy School books. But I forgot I needed to organise that well ahead of time! So this was our fallback. I think Kid 7 had intended it to be a layer cake with a chocolate layer and a mint layer, but when I found this out less than 24 hours before the party I really didn’t have the mental beans to do that. So it was all one chocolate cake with spearmint and peppermint oils added. We had to work out what “spy butterflies” meant in Kid 7’s head but eventually realised that they are little drone cameras, and mentioned in one of the EJ Spy School books. So the butterflies were done with a push-cutter thingy and pre-bought black fondant. They were supposed to have red eyes but I didn’t find red cabochons so silver it was.
Icing was a bit tricky – most types of icing have been rejected by Kid 7 as being “yucky” – including cream cheese icing, chocolate-sour-cream icing, standard buttercream, fondant and just plain whipped cream. However, Kid 7 was able to specify that they wanted “the kind of icing you make just by mixing the sugar with some water”, so an icing sugar glaze it was.
