Actually a pound cake type recipe works best for anything that's in a more intricate mold. There are good chocolate pound cakes too. I'll look around for recipes I have later if you don't get anything that you want. As far as the icing goes, sure a basic cream cheese icing can work, but it needs to stay pretty stiff. The main thing to remember when wanting to decorate with icing is to keep it fairly stiff so it's easy to work with. Just keep checking when you add the liquid to see the consistency. The recipe below is from Cooks Country and went with a red velvet cake... which might work actually. It has so much cream cheese that it doesn't use milk. I make it with about half the cream cheese and then add milk to get the consistency I want.

Frosting
16 tablespoons unsalted butter , softened
4 cups confectioners' sugar
16 ounces cream cheese , cut into 8 pieces, softened
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Pinch salt
With electric mixer, beat butter and sugar on medium-high speed until fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add cream cheese, one piece at a time, and beat until incorporated, about 30 seconds. Beat in vanilla and salt. Refrigerate until ready to use.

My basic butter cream is a stick of butter per pound of confectioners sugar, flavoring, pinch of salt and then enough milk to get whatever stiffness I need for the application.

Thanks, Coconut. I've copied and pasted your frosting recipe. I plan to make the cake tonight, and work on frosting it tomorrow morning.

I wouldn't have thought of using a pound cake recipe. The mold is not very intricate, luckily. It's a face of a transformer. It's the wrong one, apparently, because he wants Bumblebee, and this is a different character, but I figure I can decorate it yellow and black and he'll be happy. Of course, I don't like the idea of using black around 4 year olds! But what can I do if that's what dgs wants.

Sally