The Monkey House

I made this to cheer myself up during the UU job fiasco.

I'd been wanting to make coffee walnut cake for ages, but as my baking is generally for someone else's birthday, or a family treat, and the teen monkeys don't like coffee, or walnuts...

But this was MY treat to cheer ME up, so I dug around for a recipe and found this: Nigel Slater's Coffee Walnut Cake (One tiny change: a squirt of honey in the buttercream, nicked from a different recipe.)

It works. Not only did I feel better, but the job crap now sorted, and the teen monkeys like coffee and walnuts :)

I'll be making this again.

Spidermonkey's birthday is coming up, so I need a weird and wonderful cake/pie recipe. Can anyone help? This is for a normal-sized family cake. I'll do a big chocolate guitar shaped thing later when his friends come round, but I have a recipe for that already. What I need is an interesting yet yummy cake to eat on the day--emphasis on yummy rather than novelty presentation. Spider is very adventurous with food, so suggest away. It doesn't have to look like a birthday cake. US Thanksgiving foods welcome. (Why yes, I have been reading penknife's poll.)

Spider likes:
chocolate
fruit
moist, gooey, sticky cake,
carrot cake
hot chocolate
chilli
cinnamon
syrup
strangeness
weird evil-looking food
really fancy-looking food
bananas
chocolate
things he hasn't tried before
(last time he asked for a Nigella Lawson recipe where you boil up whole clementines for hours to make a gooey syrupy cake thing--it was good)


He's not so keen on
coffee
walnuts
(not a problem in subtle quantities, but don't feature as main ingredients, please)

I can cope with:
hunting down strange ingredients
small amounts of alcohol in recipe
US, UK or metric units

Things I cannot cope with:
piped icing/frosting
complicated finishing touches just before serving
ingredients with US brand names and no description to help me substitute