Muddy Dirt Cake *EDITED!*

Several years ago, I made a chocolate cake for my daughter’s birthday. Nothing special, really – just a chocolate cake that I was intending to frost with chocolate frosting.

You know what they say about intentions and the road to hell, right?

I’m not sure how it happened, but the cake would not come out of the pans. YES, I greased and floured the pans; I’m a Goddess in the Kitchen, remember? For whatever reason – whether the oven temperature was off or the humidity was wrong or the moon was in retrograde – those cakes dug in and hung on, and the only way I could get them out of the pans was in pieces.

There I was with a recipe’s worth of cake bits. Frustrated, but entirely undaunted (by then, I’d learned to look at challenges as just that – challenges – and to not let myself get too worked up), I came up with a plan. I further crumbled the bits and put them in a glass dish. Then I put together a couple of batches of chocolate pudding; the cook-and-serve kind because, really? Instant? Not so much. (And yes, I use pudding mixes. Like brownies, the stuff from the box just comes out consistently better.) Once the pudding had chilled, I folded it into the cake bits, blopped a little bit of whipped cream on top and voilla! Muddy Dirt Cake. Though it wasn’t PRETTY, the dirt cake went over HUGE with the under-five set. The grown-ups seemed to like it pretty well, too.

I’ve made this cake on purpose several times since then. Sometimes I use boxed cake mix, sometimes I start from scratch, but I always use Jello or Royal cook and serve chocolate pudding for the “mud” component. My family doesn’t require theatrics, but if they did, I would pretty this up by serving it in a clean (preferably glazed) flower pot and sticking either sugared or silk flowers in. You could make it more kid-friendly (as if it’s not enough already!) by mixing in some gummy worms and putting some candy bugs on the top. Either way, this is stupid-easy yumminess at its finest.

Edited to include this photo of Punkin’ Pie’s 11th birthday cake, complete with silk flowers and gummy worms.  The girls came to the table and didn’t know where the cake was until I pointed it out to them.  It was a HUGE hit: