I have to admit that we didn’t do much by way of decorations for our spy party.  I thought about drawing a chalk outline on the driveway, but I thought that might be a bit much for the age range we had represented.  We did purchase some crime scene tape and use it to block off areas of the house that were not used for the scavenger hunt.

I found these balloons at Oriental Trading Company:

spyballoons

We stuck with black as a “background” color but, after finding the balloons, we accented with purple.  So we had black plates but purple napkins and cups.  The local supermarket’s floral department filled my balloons; we got a handful of black latex balloons to go with them, and that was the extent of our decorations.

For the cake, I decorated a cheesecake to look like a magnifying glass.  You’ll have to excuse the sloppy, amateurish nature of its decoration –  you get to learn from my mistakes.  I used a package of Mi-Del arrowroot animal crackers, run through the blender, to make the crust.  (That way it was gluten-free so I could eat it.)  My attempt at the rim of the glass didn’t work out as I’d hoped.  After the oven was turned off, but before it was time to take the cheesecake out, I put chocolate chips all around the edge.  The idea was for them to partially melt there.  Unfortunately, the cake fell enough during that last stage of baking that the edge was no longer the edge.  I salvaged it by melting some chocolate chips in a plastic bag, snipping the corner, and squeezing the melted chocolate around the edge.  That worked, but it looked rather sloppy because of the chips that were already there.  If I were to do this again, I would skip the first set of chocolate chips and just jump straight to piping on the melted chocolate.

For the handle, I used chocolate-coated wafer cookies.  They are stacked three wide, three high, and three long.  This was just about perfect.  Unfortunately, the package had one fewer cookie than what I needed (and I was doing this at the last minute), so there’s a hole.  With that one cookie added, it would’ve been just right.  I used a little bit of the melted chocolate to stick these together.  The handle portion of this cake is not gluten-free, as I wasn’t concerned about that.  If you need yours to be gluten-free, Glutino makes a gluten-free version of these cookies.