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Shamrock-Shaped Cake
Ingredients:
Cake-Shaping Strip (from 7 sushi-mat segments)
Heavy-duty aluminum foil
Sheet pan
Prepared cake batter (see the Chocolate Mint Cookie Cake batter or prepare batter using about 2 boxes of cake mix)
White frosting (see the Cream-Cheese Buttercream Frosting recipe or use about 2 (16-ounce) containers of store-bought white frosting)
Green food dye
Chocolate-mint cookies (e.g., about 1/2 of a (10-ounce) package of Keebler's Grasshopper Fudge Mint cookies
Instructions:
1. Line a sheet pan with five overlapping sheets of foil - one under what will be the center of the cake, and the other four under the leaves and stem of the shamrock. This will let you easily wrap each sheet around a respective leaf or stem, without requiring much tearing of the foil. Shape the Cake-Shaping Strip into a shape of a shamrock. Exaggerate the spatial features, as they'll seem smaller after you unwrap and ice the cake. Wrap the bottom foil layers around the strip. Cut the foil and add extra bottom foil strips as needed to wrap around the strip. Press small balls of loosely packed foil into outer corners or edges if you think that the foil didn't wrap around the portion well enough to prevent cake-batter leakage.
2. Prepare your cake batter. Spray the strip and foil with cooking spray. Pour the cake batter into the prepared "pan" and bake until done. Let the cake cool.
3. Cut away any cake batter that leaked through the strip. Carefully remove the Cake-Shaping Strip. Insert the flat edge of a table knife between the strip and the cake if this helps.
4. Spoon a cup of the frosting into a piping bag.
5. Dye the rest of the batch of frosting green, and add a little bit of mint extract, if desired. Frost the cake with the green frosting. After it is frosted, drop a few drops of green gel food dye onto the cake and then smooth out the color a little. This will give the cake some color non-uniformity.
6. Using your white frosting, pipe on "Happy St. Patrick's Day."
6. Crush the cookies, and sprinkle them around the border of the cake.
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