The Missing Birthday Cake, in twenty seconds.
A detective party you print at home, for ages 8 to 12. Five suspects, eight evidence cards, a code wheel and one answer in a sealed letter. The film shows one clue and does not tell who did it.
Sound starts only after you tap. It pauses when you scroll away.
What the film shows.
- Evidence cards from the kit drop onto a wooden table: Granny’s photo, Footprints in the soil, Mr Heron’s note, A ring on the windowsill and Marks in the mud. The title: The Case of the Missing Birthday Cake. Printable detective party game, ages 8 to 12.
- A photo of the kitchen window at 3:20 with an empty cake plate. Granny Badger’s birthday cake has vanished.
- Five suspect cards are dealt: Hazel the Hedgehog, Milo the Magpie, Olive the Otter, Scout the Squirrel and Rufus the Hare. Only one was at the kitchen window.
- Evidence card 2, footprints in the soil. A magnifying glass shows webbed footprints in the vegetable patch. A red thread runs to Olive, the only helper with webbed feet, and a stamp says she was not at the window.
- The code wheel from the kit turns to key 5 and cracks the practice code M T S J D H F P J: it reads HONEY CAKE.
- A sealed envelope: Top secret, a letter from the helper who was at the kitchen window. The answer waits inside.
- The cards land on the table again: The Case of the Missing Birthday Cake. Printable detective party game, ages 8 to 12. 6.90 EUR at arling.sk/shop.
Every drawing in the film is a drawing from the printed kit. The code in the film is one of the practice codes on the code wheel page, not the secret note on evidence card 8, and the one clue shown rules out only one of the five helpers. Who was at the kitchen window stays a secret.
About the detective kit.
The Case of the Missing Birthday Cake is a gentle mystery for children aged 8 to 12, for 2 to 12 players and about an hour of play. The kit has 15 pages in A4 and US Letter: the case file, 5 suspect cards, 8 evidence cards, a code wheel, a logic grid with exactly one answer, detective ID cards, certificates, a party plan and the sealed letter. It costs 6.90 EUR, one payment.
See all 15 pages and get the kit.
How the film is made.
There is no video file on this page. Every frame is drawn on a canvas by a small script, using the same vector drawings that are printed in the kit, and every sound is synthesised by Web Audio in your browser after you tap. No photo, no recording, no picture generator. The same script renders the film frame by frame into a video for YouTube and Instagram.
It is built to be light: what does not move is drawn once and reused, the film stops when it ends, when you scroll away or switch tabs, and it shows a still picture if your device asks for reduced motion. Questions: andrej@arling.sk.
Our pseudonymous statistics (self-hosted Umami) count the page visit and whether the film was started, replayed or its price label was clicked. Nothing else.