Chocolate Covered Oreo Cake

So Father's Day was yesterday, which in my family always means that dad gets to do whatever he wants to do that day. My dad spent his morning playing golf, then went to church, then spent the rest of his day relaxing and watching the sweet golf tournament that was on television. Father's Day ALSO means that there will be a fabulous meal, followed by a rather decadent dessert, which is how I got roped into this whole mess.

We decided to get dinner from this Chinese restaurant that we love, but I volunteered to make a dessert for the family since I'm on this cooking kick. So I set off to scour the blogs and search for something that would please my papa's palate (aka: chocolate). I came upon the most awesome recipe ever.

Dine and Dish, found via my favorite web site, Food Gawker, makes the most amazing Oreo Cake I have ever seen. Sure, you buy a cookies and cream ice cream cake and pop some Oreos on top and call it an Oreo cake, but this one by far was most holy in the land of Oreo Cakes.

I would have taken more pictures, but my older sister was helping me and we were having far too much fun trying to remove the cream cheese from the electric mixer beaters to remember our cameras until the process was nearly complete, but here are the ones I do have!


Here are our two 9-inch round chocolate cakes. I used a Devil's Food store bought cake mix which is what the recipe called for (and I have never before made a cake "from scratch" and didn't want to mess this one up!). However, the cake came out a little dry, which was pretty disappointing. For super-moist cake mix, I would recommend Betty Crocker. She's got some sweet pudding-cake mixes that just make the cake come out perfectly moist every time. The dryness of the kind that we used, at least for me, really detracted from the overall taste of the cake.


Next we have the filling, which is cream cheese, sugar, whipped cream and crushed oreos. Let me just tell you to be really careful when you try to use a mixer with cream cheese. The stuff we used wasn't quite soft enough yet, so it got all sorts of stuck inside the beater, which was no bueno for me. I had to scrape it out and it got really annoying at the end. However, it did soften up a little bit and was flying out all over the place, so that's always good, right? Anyways, this is the finished product. It was sweet, creamy and chock-full of delicious pieces of double-stuffed oreos! (Which my sister and I thought would be a fabulous idea since who would choose regular oreos over double stuffed? But we soon learn that crushing double stuffed oreos is difficult because the cream sticks to your bag and is just such a mess!)


Then we made this delicious chocolate dip, which is melted butter and melted baking chocolate. The recipe said 2 minutes to melt it, but we did it in 30 second increments 3 times, so only a minute and a half to get it completely melted. This stuff was one of the best parts of the cake, as when it cooled, it created this delicious ganache-like shell over top of the cake. Yummm.


Here is the finished product! To assemble the cake, you take the bottom layer and lay it top-down on your dish, then cover the top surface with your cream filling, then place the 2nd layer top-up. After you are sure that the layers aren't going to slide apart, you take your cooled chocolate dip and poured it over the top. I poured it all in the center, then smoothed it around with a spatula to get it to drip down the sides. It got a little messy, and if I want to try that again I should probably do it when the chocolate is a little less viscous. It kinda globbed down instead of ran down. But we learn from our mistakes, right? For the topping, on Dine and Dish, they used regular crushed oreos, but my sister and I were tired of the gooey mess that made, so I decided to take 6 oreos and put them in the almighty Magic Bullet and ran it for about 15 seconds to get these amazing super light and powdery crumbs that I just sprinkled over the top. If you have a magic bullet and ever need to make an oreo crust, or Oreo Truffles, I totally recommend using double-stuffed oreos and blending them up because the cream helps it stick together really well. But again, I digress.


And here it is with a nice, tasty slice taken right out of it. I have to admit, the cake was pretty darn good. The chocolate dip on the top plus the oreo crumbs were a great combination, and the filling was sweet but not overly so like the filling of regular oreos are. I was very pleased with the results, except for the dry cake.

My family all loved it, though! I am a little critical of myself, but that's alright.

So I've found my mistakes and things I would like to improve on for this (rather cheap) recipe:
- Use a more moist cake mix
- Soften cream cheese ALL THE WAY to make mixing easier
- Pour the chocolate dip before it gets too thick, or create a border around the top to hold it in and keep it from running down the sides cause it looks kinda sloppy
- Double stuffed oreos may or may not be the best idea for this recipe

And things that I LOVED about this recipe and how it turned out:
- The dip and oreo combination
- The light sweetness of the filling
- The simplicity of preparing this recipe
- How cost-effective it was. (Granted we had most of these ingredients already in the house, but we bought cake mix, a huge tub of whipped cream, the package of oreos and the Baker's chocolate for $10.00 which I feel is a pretty good deal, considering ordering a cake would be about $25.00)

And once again, you can find the recipe for this cake HERE

Thanks for reading!