Do Not Trifle With A Carmel Lover!

Hello. My name is Angela and I’m a chocoholic. I’ll consume just about anything smothered in chocolate. I’ve even considered trying chocolate covered ants and grasshoppers (but haven’t actually done the deed yet).

My Honey Badger’s Mom, however, isn’t a chocolate freak (which makes her a little odd and suspect to the rest of us, just so you know.) She is, however, a caramel lover. So, for her birthday, she wanted a caramel cake.

I’ve never made a caramel cake before and things just sort of “happened” to cause the cake pictured above to come to pass. This is how it played out:

Honey Badger and I were treasure hunting at our local antique and thrift stores. It was getting late and we were having fun. I’d promised to help him fix a birthday dinner for his mom. I was starting to sweat it, because it was getting later and later… he was fine with the time, saying it was only a cookout and no big deal… because Honey Badgers don’t have a clue about what it is to be a list-maker, a cook, or a hopeless planner. (We are working these things out… but it’s painfully slow.)

Badger found a Trifle dish that he liked (Yeah, he actually does like things like this, which makes him awesome as a treasure hunting partner). He asked me if I liked it. I liked it, but I  try not to accumulate dishes that don’t stack well, store easily and that have only occasional uses — it flies in the face of my living small tendencies. He asked me if I thought his Mom would like it. I told him that if he bought it, I’d make her a birthday cake to fill it. We carried it out of the store.

By the time we got to the grocery store, I had less than an hour to bake, cool, frost and decorate the cake. There was NO WAY this was going to happen from scratch, so I cheated.

I bought a pound cake (the round kind) because it was on sale (I’d probably use an angel food version, if I had it to do over.) Then, I dashed around the store looking for layers to use to create an impressive caramel birthday cake.

The result was a 13-layer trifle literally erupting with caramel and butterscotch flavors (with just a tiny bit of chocolate for the Badger to enjoy).

The layers were as follows (and in this order) and created one of the heaviest and most calorie-laden creations that I’ve ever made:

1. Thin layer of pound cake
2. Layer of Chocolate Mousse (I used the instant kind, since there was no time to create it from scratch)
3. Thin layer of pound cake
4. Thick cream frosting mixture: cream cheese, sweetened condensed milk and powdered sugar with vanilla and whipped up into a thick, spread
5. A sprinkling of crushed up Heath Bars (chocolate and toffee)
6. Thin layer of pound cake
7. A layer of sweetened, hand-whipped heavy cream
8. Thin layer of pound cake
9. Layer of butterscotch baking chips
10. Thin layer of pound cake
11. Layer of caramel (a whole package of carmel squares – the kind you dip apples in – melted with about 1/3 cup of heavy cream over a double boiler and cooled before adding to cake.)
12. Thin layer of pound cake
13. Whipped cream topping with Ghirardelli brand carmel filled chocolate squares put in the cream corner down and a sprinkling of Heath bar crumbles to garnish.

I think the thing weighed about 10 pounds. Seriously.

It was served with praline ice cream (and would have had a layer of pecans, but the Honey Badger pouted and said no one other than his Mom and me would eat the cake if it had nuts.) *sigh*

A few technical details: I didn’t have an icing bag, so I “made do” with a ziplock baggie. I filled it with the whipped cream for the top of the cake and snipped off a tiny corner. This allowed me to squeeze out the topping in swirls for a more decorative effect. 🙂

I had to slice the cake carefully, and then remove a section (of a different size each time) of each slice to make it fit properly in the trifle bowl (which flutes OUT as it goes up).

This  was the final product:

Not beautiful, but nice… and the flavors made up for any lack of surface beauty. 🙂