Cake question

[woolymonkey]

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

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Recipe here, in case you can't find where you've stashed it. It's very straightforward; there are many other variations on the web. And, as others have said, you can always add spices. I'm not sure about carving it into exotic shapes; I suspect probably not, though it did slice quite cleanly.

Let us know what you do, and how it goes...?

[woolymonkey.livejournal.com]

Thank you! If I make it for the party, it won't be for a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I offer my current favourite beetroot recipe by way of trade. Actually, it's not so much a recipe as a list of things to put in a blender.