Up until last summer, my only childhood memory of funfetti was Betty Crocker’s box mixes my mom would get to make special occasion cakes. Our girls’ getaway to Whistler last summer added another memory to the collection: the ‘unicorn poop’ that led to unstoppable laughter.

What is unicorn poop? It’s creamy, sweet, frozen, studded with rainbow sprinkles, swirled with an electric teal frosting, and can be found at Cow’s. While teens (ahem, high schoolers) are notorious for partying and (ahem, illegally) drinking in Whistler, the only place you’ll find our crew at night is standing in line at the Cow’s ice cream parlour. Okay, there was no line up because it was dumping buckets of rain and we were the only ones smart enough to take advantage of the rare opportunity. After every dinner, we trekked through the village to grab double scoops before heading back to our vacation rental to chill. Chew’s favourite flavour was birthday cake, which she nicknamed unicorn poop because that’s essentially what it is. I had that too and oh my goodness it’s flipping delicious. Worth every shiver in the rain.

There was that one night we clearly had too much sugar. Finished cups of Cow’s ice cream stacked up on the coffee table and gigantic s’mores toasting in the oven. All of us were lounging around on the sofas in our pajamas laughing hysterically at absolutely nothing for a solid 15 minutes. Like out of the blue laughing until only the pain from our stomachs was stopping us from laughing any longer. After 5 years of hanging around Chew, you’ll learn that she has the ability to laugh spontaneously at anything (or nothing at all) and does so especially after 10pm; we call it her ‘giggle hour’. So naturally, she was the one to initiate the laughter. But no know knew why. Soon Jaimie started laughing at Chew’s laugh and the rest of us started laughing because of how random the whole situation was. Periodically Eileen and I would ask, “What are we laughing at?” which only made everything more hilarious. I swear the unicorn poop is to blame.

It was such a memorable weekend that we pledged to make this girls’ trip an annual thing. We’re already counting down the days until we can get our hands on more unicorn poop and make up more dreadful truth or dares like “lick the floor” and “talk with an accent for the rest of the game”. Hopefully sans torrential rain storm this year.

As a tribute to that wonderful summer vacation, I took the elements of the birthday cake ice cream and put them back into a cake to celebrate Chew’s entrance into the second decade of life. Not just any cake though, a double-decker vanilla funfetti cheesecake! Complete with naturally tinted seafoam green (failed *see notes) ganache dripping down the sides and a glittery unicorn adorning the top.

To make up for my terrible not-really-ganache, there is an Oreo cookie base and a gooey cookie dough filling, which is perfect because Chew loves all things cookies; who doesn’t? The cookie dough filling is OMG-so-flippin’-good you might want to double the recipe so you have your own bowl to eat out of as you construct the cake. Admittedly, this isn’t the healthiest creation on planet Earth but quoting the wise philosophical birthday girl, “Live a little”.

If you are looking for an all-out super healthy birthday cake, try our Chocolate Fudge Cake with so much hidden vegetables it’s pretty much a salad, or our Cookie Dough Coconut Cake, which is refined sugar free and decadent. Both are richly flavoured, gluten free, and ready to par-tay! Funfetti and Oreo lovers can shimmy on forward to the recipe below.

Notes about the recipe:

• The types of sprinkles I used leeched quite a bit of colour into the cheesecake batter. Sally recommends using jimmies or quins to avoid discolouring your batter.
• I was going for the trendy drip cake look but totally screwed up the ganache and thus have not included it in the recipe below. To save yourself a heart attack, you can try using some white chocolate melts on their own with 1/4 tsp of spirulina whisked in for colour. Alternatively, if you want a more vibrantly hued icing and have gel food colouring on hand, feel free to use that.
• I lined the sides of my pan with parchment paper to and as the cake cooled, the paper crinkled and made the sides wrinkly. So I suggest that you line just the bottom.

Cookie dough filling lightly adapted from Natural Chow