Chocolate Dream Cake

I’d never heard of a chocolate dream cake before this week. Have you tried googling “dream cake”? There are so many recipes out there! Some similar to a normal cake, some with extra egg and whipped toppings, and some with coconut flour. But finally I stumbled across the right one, and this is definitely the most amazing cake recipe I’ve seen so far.

Take a devil’s food cake, and poke holes in it. Then pour on a layer of caramel, and follow that with some sweetened condensed milk. And in case that isn’t enough, top with some crushed up candy (preferably chocolate covered toffee).

This cake is really a recipe for heart disease.

I chose a slightly lighter devil’s food cake for this. I was already planning to pair the cake with chocolate icing and chocolate ganache, so it will be very chocolatey either way. Also, the black devil’s food cake is already a little more fudgy, so I though a slightly more firm cake would hold the caramel and sweetened condensed milk better.

Once the cake layers were cooled and layered, I used a fork to poke holes all over. I tried to make the holes go down only halfway into the cake layer, as I didn’t want to have anything leaking out of the bottom of the cake! I then took a few tablespoons of the caramel and spooned it on top, followed by a similar amount of sweetened condensed milk. Because this was only a 6″ cake, I didn’t want to overload it with too many fillings, as they are pretty sickly sweet (who am I kidding? That’s a pretty fully loaded cake layer right there).

For the frosting, I took a chocolate buttercream, but in place of the 2 tbsp of cream, I added two tbsp of sweetened condensed milk, and around one and a half of half & half. I was hoping the sweetened condensed milk would give it a slightly fudgy texture. I spread this between the two layers of the cake and drizzled with a little more caramel and sweetened condensed milk before placing on the second layer of cake.

Once the cake was entirely frosted, it was on to my favourite part: decoration! I made a chocolate fudge sauce using the leftover sweetened condensed milk, and spread this over the top of the cake. I reserved some in a ziploc bag so I could make a nice ring of drips around the cake. I then piped on concentric circles of caramel and sweetened condensed milk on top of the chocolate fudge layer, and dragged a scribe tool through to produce a spider-web type pattern on top of the cake.

A dream cake typically has crushed candy bars on it. I chose Rolos because the chocolate & caramel combination worked well with this cake. I took one package of rolos and crushed them up in a plastic bag, then sprinkled these crumbs around the outside of the cake. Because the caramel in the Rolos makes them a little harder to crush into nice even crumbs, I mixed with some chopped up baker’s chocolate.

On its own, this might have been enough, but I figure a cake this rich deserves an equally outrageous design. So I put my remaining chocolate fudge buttercream and piped it on using a star tip to produce 8 swirls around the edge of the cake. I topped each swirl with a half Rolo to finish off the cake.

As you can probably see in the above photo, the swirls aren’t totally even around the cake. I’ve been using these 6″ cakes as a way to test out different piping styles (as I did with the flourless chocolate cake , pleated ruffle cake and Easter watercolour drip cake). So with this cake I learned that I need to let the fudge topping set for longer before piping on the buttercream; the weight of the buttercream here made the fudge slide down the cake slightly, which pulled the buttercream to the sides. Now that I know this, the next time I do a cake like this I know I can do it right!

The best part about this cake, however, is going to be the flavour. The moist chocolate cake, rich caramel and sweetened condensed milk, crunchy Rolo crumbs in the middle, a chocolate fudge buttercream, fudge sauce, and even more rolos on top – this cake is fully loaded! I wish I didn’t have to give this away, because I’d love to have a taste of this cake – it really is a dream (cake) come true.