Grasshopper Poke Cake: A Cakey Experiment

I recently made my first "poke cake" for a family picnic to celebrate Mother's Day. I had never made a poke cake before, and I'm still not entirely sure what the purpose of poking holes in the cake was. I think you could just make this without that step, but we'll talk about that later.

I found this recipe from somethingswanky.com on Pinterest and decided to give it a try. Just looking at the photos made me want to eat it, and I don't get an occasion to bake a cake very often.

I mostly followed the recipe but made a few changes along the way. Here is my revised list of ingredients.

Ingredients:
1 Chocolate Cake Mix
     - Plus the required eggs, oil, and water
14 oz. Sweetened Condensed Milk
12 oz. Hot Fudge Sauce (not chocolate syrup)
1 Package Keebler Grasshopper Cookies (or Thin Mints)
20 oz. Whipped Topping (1 small container, 1 large container)
Mint Extract
1 Box Andes Mints
Green Food Coloring (optional)

I baked the cake per the box's directions in a 9x13" pan and let it cool. For the poke cake, I poked about 20 holes in the cake with the end of a wooden spoon, as the recipe instructed me to do.

I did not poke the holes the entire way through to the bottom - about 3/4
of the way through

Then, I (sort of) carefully spooned the sweetened condensed milk into each of the holes. I'm going to be honest here. I don't know what the purpose of pouring sweetened condensed milk into holes in a cake actually is other than maybe to help keep it moist. I think the cake would have been just as good without this.

As I said, "sort of carefully"

I warmed up the jar of fudge sauce (it doesn't need to be hot) and stirred in crumbled grasshopper cookies. I used about one third of the package here and just crumbled them with my hands. You will use the entire jar of fudge sauce. You can scoop the fudge out of the jar and then stir in the crumbled cookies. I hate washing dishes when I don't have to, so I mixed the fudge and cookies together as I spread it all on the top of the cake instead of using a bowl. I'm sure this worked just fine. 

The cake will look pretty lumpy and not very pretty. That's okay. The pretty steps come later.

See? Not very pretty.

I stirred together the 2 tubs of whipped topping and a few drops of food green food coloring to give it that minty color (which is hard to see from the photo, I apologize). Then I mixed in the mint extract a teaspoon at a time until it reached my desired minty-ness. You should use at least 3-4 teaspoons.

Once the color and mint flavor were both to my liking, I spread the whipped topping on the cake. You might think 20 oz. sounds like a lot, but once you stir whipped topping, you'll find it looks like less than you thought. Using the 8 oz. container will not sufficiently cover your cake. Plus, can you really have too much whipped topping? Not really.

It was minty green IRL

All that's left is to crumble your Andes mints and grasshopper cookies and sprinkle them on top of the cake. It's really up to you how much you use, how much you like mint and chocolate, which I'm assuming is a lot if you're going to eat this cake. I ended up using most of the Andes mints and about another third of the package of cookies, maybe a few more. I caught my boyfriend swiping a few of the cookies along the way. 

Much prettier!

I refrigerated the cake overnight for about 12 hours before removing it for the drive to my parents' house. Upon arrival, we stored the cake in their refrigerator (one of two refrigerators...TWO!) until it was time to cut and serve dessert. The weather was pretty warm, and I didn't want the topping to melt in the sun.

Below is the second piece cut from the cake. As you can see, the topping is a little runny or melted looking, which I was disappointed about. Because this cake is rich, you can't eat a very large piece. That means I was left with about half of the cake to take home. I stored it in the refrigerator at home, and the topping was much more solid the following day. 

If you take a look at the photos from the original recipe, you'll see her topping is more solid as well. This is what my leftover cake looked like after being refrigerated longer. All I can say is that your cake would be just fine made a day in advance, but if you want the frosting to be more firm and less melty looking, I'd give it about 24 hours in the fridge as opposed to the recipe's suggested 4 hours or my 12 hours.

Melty but still good

Would I make this again? Absolutely. I would definitely make sure it had enough time for the whipped topping to set, and I'd be curious to find out what the difference would be without the sweetened condensed milk.

Note: The entire time I was writing this, all I could think of was this.

And this.