Secret Sweets

If the stars align and the babysitting gods smile upon us, Shrike and I will be having a romantic Valentine's dinner for two at home tomorrow evening.

So, today, I had two goals for myself:
Get the house clean and looking nice
Decide on and bake a special dessert

Evidently those two things are mutually exclusive.

It didn't get any better before she got home. Of after, for that matter.

The dessert is finished and in the auxilliary fridge, where Shrike is forbidden from going, because it's a surprise, despite Peeper's attempts at giving it away.

As we were getting started on it, I had to call Shrike to ask if what she'd done with the sugar. It turns out we didn't have enough - but I'd bought powdered sugar for some reason (I think one version of this recipe called for it, but not the one I ended up making. Except that it did, because I substituted. That substitution works much better this direction.)

I had her on speaker phone and she asked, "So, what are you making?" and Peeper blurted it out!

Luckily, between the speaker phone and the two-year-old diction, she still doesn't know what it us.

But here are a few hints.