I made a mango cake from this recipe (coincidentally vegan), and a mango icing that I basically freestyled (similar to last year's), and sandwiched it with a kind of mango jam.
For the cake:
2 cups / 220 g / 7.76 oz plain flour
2 tsp / 8 g baking powder
½ tsp / 3 g bicarbonate of soda
½ cup / 120 ml veg oil
1 cup / 225 g / 7.9 oz sugar
1 cup / 265 ml mango purée (used tinned)
1 tsp / 5 ml vanilla extract (used powder)
¼ cup / 60 g milk (used oat milk)
For the icing:
4 oz butter
4 oz icing sugar
c. 1/2 cup (or more if possible, replacing some or all of the icing sugar) freeze-dried mango, powdered
For the mango 'jam':
1 packet dried mango, snipped into small pieces
For the decoration:
101 dark chocolate balls
93 pale bluish white balls
33 blue balls (note: it would have been nice if 4 of these were a darker blue or purple)
2 white chocolate balls
A rectangular perler base plate with at least 20 x 25 perler places
To make the cake:
Heat the oven to 180C and lined an 8 inch round cake tin with baking paper.
In a medium bowl, whisk flour, baking powder and bicarb.
In a large bowl, whisk sugar and oil together until pale and well combined. Add the mango puree and beat well. Beat in the vanilla and milk.
Gently fold the flour mixture into the liquid mixture and mix until everything is well combined and there are no large flour pockets. Do not overmix.
Pour the batter into the cake tin and bake for 30-35 min, until a skewer comes out clean. Let cool completely before icing.
To make the icing:
Beat the butter in a medium bowl until pale. Add the icing sugar and powdered freeze-dried mango and beat some more. Chill until needed, but bring to room temperature before using.
To make the mango 'jam':
Put the dried mango in a small bowl and cover (just) with hot water. Let soak overnight or for several hours. Blend with a wand blender to a thick, smooth, jam-like consistency.
To assemble:
Cut the cooled cake horizontally in half to make two layers. I froze the cake after cooling and cutting because I thought it might make it easier to ice - perhaps it did, but I also think it might have messed up the texture and made it a bit too dense.
When ready to ice, put the bottom half on a plate or serving disc, then spread the mango 'jam' over it. Put the second cake half on top. Spread the icing over the top and round the sides as smoothly as possible.
Press the perler plate, spike side down, into the icing quite hard until you can see a grid of indentations. Then arrange the balls according to this design:
The birthday boy seemed happy with it! He ate lots and didn't dis it at all - he's a bit of a grumpy handful these days so that felt like success. I thought the cake was a bit dense but it tasted pretty good. The rest of the tin of mango puree became delicious smoothies, it was really good.