S'mores cake. I mean, trifle.

This week I joined my co-workers at a Cubs game.  I'm sure it comes as absolutely no surprise that my favorite part of the game was when a dessert cart came to visit our suite.  It was loaded with deliciousness, but one treat jumped out at me immediately: a smores layer cake.  As I was digging in, I was thinking, "I bet I could make this."  And over the course of the next 10 minutes, two co-workers wandered over to tell me I should make a smores cake this weekend.  Never one to back down from a dessert request (though honestly, it felt a little more like a demand than a request), I set off to the internet and read dozens of recipes to find the perfect one. 

Once I settled on a recipe, I stopped off at the store to pick up some supplies.  And then I read dozens more recipes, and bought additional supplies. (Insert your own "boy, Katie sure has OCD" joke here.)  It's possible I bought more than necessary...

First up - mixing up a graham cracker cake & adding cocoa to half of it:

Placed those in the oven & moved on to the milk chocolate ganache, which started like this:

And then sat around for 5 minutes looking like this:

A few seconds into whisking, it looks terribly wrong:

And then with a few more spins of the whisk, it magically turned into this:

Why am I showing you so many pictures of ganache?  Because it was the most successful part of this recipe.  But more on that later...

Pulled the cakes out of the oven:

After letting them cool for 5 minutes, turned them out of their pans to cool completely - everything seems perfectly normal:

And then...disaster strikes.  I decided to split the cake layers so I could make my creation look as fancy as the dessert cart version.  And that's when I learned that the recipe I chose made an incredibly crumbly cake.  For those who have never split a cake layer, crumbly = bad.  One half of the plain graham cracker layer split in three pieces.  And then pieces of the chocolate layer started to fall off.  I sighed a few times.

Plan A: leave the split layers together as if I had never cut them in half.  Spread marshmallow fluff over top.  Fail.

Plan B: remove the top half of each layer and try to make a cake with the remaining half. Fail.

Plan C: ditch all hope of making a beautiful, fancy layer cake and dump everything into a bowl instead. Fail?  No. Success!  You know why? Milk chocolate ganache.  It makes all things perfect and wonderful.

Lessons learned and recipe thoughts:

1. I'm not even going to bother typing up this cake recipe.  No one should use it.  Ever.

2. Despite multiple disasters, Brett declared the cake "yummy!"

3. Smores trifle sounds ever so much nicer than, "yeah, the cake was all messed up, so I dumped everything in a bowl. Just eat it."