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:
- Thin layer of pound cake
- Layer of Chocolate Mousse (I used the instant kind, since there was no time to create it from scratch)
- Thin layer of pound cake
- Thick cream frosting mixture: cream cheese, sweetened condensed milk and powdered sugar with vanilla and whipped up into a thick, spread
- A sprinkling of crushed up Heath Bars (chocolate and toffee)
- Thin layer of pound cake
- A layer of sweetened, hand-whipped heavy cream
- Thin layer of pound cake
- Layer of butterscotch baking chips
- Thin layer of pound cake
- 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.)
- Thin layer of pound cake
- 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. 🙂
