Cadbury Creme Egg Cake

There’s this great line in the movie “What About Bob?” Bob is explaining why he and his ex-wife split up to his new psychologist: “There are two types of people in this world: Those who like Neil Diamond, and those who don’t. My ex-wife loves him.”

I think the same is true about Cadbury creme eggs. People seem to love them or hate them. I rarely find someone who is ambivalent.

Sometimes I think I should have a little more shame for my long-standing creme egg obsession.

I mean, have you ever watched someone eat them? There is no graceful way to eat a Cadbury egg. At least not the way I do it. There is a lot of gross licking and slurping of the gooey center. It’s something that is probably best done in private.

One spring in my twenties I was housesitting for friends in Portland (Hi Friedles!) and I went through a really intense Cadbury egg phase. I was obsessed with eating them while reading Richard Simmons’ autobiography, Still Hungry After All These Years. There’s probably something really messed up psychologically about that, but I can’t explain how fulfilling it was to slowly eat Cadbury eggs while reading about how Richard Simmons talked through how he started Slimmons or about that time that he was in a Fellini movie. I feel like if he had known what I was doing, he would have shrieked and hit the Cadbury eggs out of my hands.

Which reminds me, did I ever tell you about the time that I went on a Richard Simmons cruise? No? Something for another post then.

Anyway, Cadbury eggs. I love them. So here I am this Easter making a Cadbury creme egg cake, which is a dream that I’ve always had.

Side note: I think I justify waaaaaay too many decisions in my life because “I’ve always wanted to do ________________.” The problem with this YOLO way of thinking is that you can justify anything, like driving from Michigan to Brooklyn in one night while playing the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn” over and over again.

You only live once!

You know what? I think I actually decided to have a kid because of the YOLO mentality.

You know what though? I could do without toddler tantrums. I mean it is funny when Ansel throws himself on the ground with Oscar-winning-level emotion because we gave him the wrong crackers or because he wanted the purple plate, but he got the orange plate.

YOLO!

And then there’s our dive into potty training. You would not believe the level of excitement around here when someone “pees in the potty.” And the one time he successfully pooped in the potty? We were cheering so much, you would have thought we won the lottery or something.

Okay, okay, let’s get back to creme eggs!

I’ve wanted to make a cake like this for some time. And I’ve also wanted to try the technique of making a “drip cake” too. (I did this for a Halloween cake a while back, but only with moderate success.)

There are actually a ton of Cadbury creme egg cakes out there – some have crushed creme eggs in the frosting, others bake creme eggs inside the cake. I even found a creme egg ice cream cake, which I thought was quite creative.

I just wanted to create a cake that felt inspired by creme eggs and was topped with eggs – nothing too complicated.

First, I made my favorite dark chocolate cake – two cakes in six-inch cake pans. Then I whipped up buttercream frosting and tinted half of it the yellow color of the inside of a creme egg. I tried to make each layer of frosting appear like spread-out creme egg filling – yellow in the center with white surrounding it.

Then I covered the exterior of the cake in yellow and white buttercream and popped the cake in the freezer to let it set while I made a chocolate ganache. And this is where the fun part came in – I dripped chocolate ganache around the edge of the cake and it worked out perfectly!

No crazy liquid-y drips here! The ganache was at the right temperature to only drip for a little way down the cake before it hardened and stopped. And then, I covered the whole thing with a slew of creme eggs that I bought at Target. I have to say, the cake actually turned out like I had imagined it! And it was Cadbury-creme-egg level delicious. The perfect thing to slice up and give to our neighbors for some Easter cheer.

Ansel did not get a slice because he was already hopped up on the gigantic Costco muffins that we had at our little Easter brunch celebration. But he did get to go around the house and the yard finding empty Easter eggs. When he wasn’t looking, we’d just grab eggs out of his basket and throw them back in the yard to have him find them again. I don’t know how many times we did this, but he never seemed to figure that his basket of eggs would mysteriously disappear and then eggs would reappear in the yard.

Alas, the Easter celebrations were cute and my mom gave him a set of tunnels for his toy railroad, which was a huge hit.

Of course now – as we prepare for dinner – there are tears of anguish because Aaron is washing Ansel’s hands before dinner. And who knows what will happen when we don’t give him all of the raisins that he demands.