Cookie Dough Brownie Cake

Since I started seriously baking roughly 7 years ago, I have had many, many baking failures and disasters. Most notable was the first time I every attempted to make a tier cake. A friend’s mother recommended me to make a cake for her daughter’s upcoming baby shower and silly, 19-year-old me thought I could handle it. Let me preface this all by saying I have been the world’s biggest klutz from the day I was born. It’s a miracle I haven’t destroyed more baked goods in my baking history.

Anyways, back to the cake. The cake she wanted was simple enough – vanilla cake with vanilla frosting with green and blue polka dots on top. At the time, I was baking in my parent’s tiny kitchen with limited counter space and no central air which meant in the summer time I was sometimes baking in a 100+ degree kitchen between the outside heat and the oven.

About 3 hours into my baking I realized this was going to be a much larger task than I had originally anticipated when my normal cake recipe didn’t produce as many layers as I wanted and I had to run to Wegman’s at 9:30 at night for more cake flour. Fast forward to about 12:30AM and I had the base tier on the crumb coat and cooling in the fridge. As I was beginning the top coat, I knew my layers weren’t 100% cooled but I figured they were close enough that I could start my crumb coat. I was wrong.

I spent the next hour/hour and a half battling with my frosting trying to keep my cake layers stacked long enough to cool in the fridge. At about 2AM I thought I finally had it down and took it out of the fridge to do some touching up. Well, as there was not a lot of counter space in my parent’s kitchen, I ended up setting the cake stand on something uneven. I turned to grab my angled spatula from the hot water I had it sitting in and somehow managed to bump my cake stand, sending my entire top-tier onto the floor of my kitchen, splatting into one giant lump of cake and buttercream.

Long story short, I spent a good 1/2 hour on the floor crying while my dog enjoyed a nice helping of baby shower cake before I pulled myself together, went to Wegman’s (again) at 3 AM and returned to finish the cake. The finished product was nothing like I had originally planned and I still feel guilty to this day for giving the woman that cake.

Anyways, I’m telling you this story because I had a similar encounter with this recipe. This cake is 3 layers of gooey fudge brownies, packed with cookie dough frosting and finished with gobs of edible cookie dough. At about 9PM the night I made, I decided 2 layers of brownie weren’t enough for this monster and I needed to make 2 more. Due to my lack of patience and desire to go to bed, I stayed up battling my melting cookie dough frosting until one layer eventually ended up on the bottom of my fridge anyways. Oh well – at least the remaining layers tasted good!

If you decide to attempt this cake, I highly recommend sticking to 2, maybe 3 layers max – after that, the brownies start to get too heavy for the frosting making this one unstable cake. If you’re a daredevil like myself, I recommend getting a few cake pillars at your local store to stabilize the bottom layers. Good luck!