Christmas Cake Fun

This is a picture of our fun Christmas cake that we made for dessert yesterday. You don't need a fancy cake pan to do this, just make a Christmas tree pattern and use a serrated knife to cut it out. To make it easy, we folded our paper in half and drew the design on one side, so it would be symmetrical.

If you have time, the cake is easier to cut and holds up better, if you freeze it first. I think a few hours would do it. Just wrap it in plastic wrap first. If not, you can do like we did and just put icing on the top (the sides were too crumbly to hold the icing and were trying to fall apart).

Anyway, to make this, you need:

• a boxed cake (we used white), and eggs & oil to make it
• a 13 x 9 baking dish
• homemade icing (recipe follows)
• mint extract
• sugar cubes (we found them at Food Lion)
• matches
• dropper or pipette

Homemade Icing

Ingredients:

• 1 lb powdered sugar
• 1 cup cream cheese (I used the 1/3 less fat in the little tub, which incorporates easier without being room temp)
• 1/4 cup butter spread (I used smart balance)
• tablespoons of milk, as needed
• dash of salt
• 2 teaspoons pure orange extract (or whatever you like, but this is great)
• food coloring

Directions:

Dump everything in the mixer, except the milk and food coloring, and mix on low, adding tablespoons of milk until it gets to spreading consistency. Do this carefully, so your icing doesn't get runny. Mix on medium to get everything incorporated well. If making the presents, scoop out several half cups of icing into bowls for tinting various colors, then color the remaining bulk of your icing green.

After we iced the cake and presents, then came the fun part!


When you are ready to eat your cake, arrange a few sugar cubes (not many--we used six) on your cake, as though they are lights. Put a few drops of mint extract on each cube and then light them with a match.

Quickly turn off the lights and ooh and ahh for a few seconds while they burn a pretty blue!  Fun times. :-)

Please note:  If you put too many cubes on your cake, some will go out before the others are lit--they burn quickly. And my kids said the post-burn cubes don't taste good, although our dog begged to differ.

(We got this idea from a Christmas book called The ADVENTure of Christmas.)