I do know the idea of “what to do with leftover Halloween sweet” seems like somebody inventing an issue. Like with casserole or meat sauce or Thanksgiving turkey, changing into leftovers is Halloween sweet’s raison d’être. And in contrast to these different delicacies, a wrapped Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup will take months to go unhealthy — that means {that a} good trick-or-treat haul ensures plentiful snacking by way of the fallow seasons. You may have gathered, and now your loved ones will survive the winter.
However let’s say you have been a teensy bit sick of bite-sized sweet bars as they’re, otherwise you went right into a fugue state on November 1 and acquired so many kilos of low cost Halloween sweet that your roommate is anxious. There are methods to cook dinner with it to make use of up extra without delay. My favourite choice is to make use of sweet bars as a fast and simple cake glaze, and I imply really easy it’s one of many first issues I realized to make by myself.
I first turned conscious of this trick from my mother’s copy of Chocolate from the Cake Combine Physician, by Anne Byrn, who made a profession out of growing creative diversifications of boxed cake combine. Her recipe for Milky Method Swirl Cake, which she says she present in a problem of Vogue, requires 5 full-sized Milky Method bars. (When Byrn wrote the recipe, they weighed 2.05 ozeach, which she complains was down from 2.23 oz. Now, they’re 1.84 oz.) Half of the sweet bars are sliced and blended into yellow cake combine. The opposite half are melted, with two tablespoons of butter and two teaspoons of water, right into a glaze to pour on high of the cake.
In faculty, I began making this cake for my birthday, after which for everybody else’s birthdays, as a result of the glaze is revelatory. The chocolate and caramel collectively make it stickier and extra advanced than icing, however the nougat retains it from changing into as wealthy as ganache. When you can soften something in a saucepan, you may make this. And pouring it over a cake is a lot simpler, and simply as visually gorgeous, as frosting the entire thing with buttercream. (I’m sorry, however irrespective of the type, buttercream tastes like nothing.) It labored in faculty as a result of I had a shared dorm kitchen and minimal provides. However even now, with a stand mixer and multiple bowl at my disposal, I don’t assume cake will get a lot better than this.
The unique recipe requires Milky Method bars, however the method adapts to loads of different chocolate sweet. Snickers and three Musketeers would work equally, as would bite-sized Krackle or 100 Grand. Twix or Equipment Kat, with their cookie and wafer parts, is likely to be harder to soften however might additionally offer you a extra diversified texture. Byrn additionally has a recipe for an Straightforward Hershey Bar Swirl Cake. You may experiment, and if it doesn’t work with a sure sweet, you’ve barely wasted any elements.
You don’t even should make the cake recipe within the guide. This methodology works on virtually any cocoa-friendly cake, on ice cream, or anytime you have to drizzle one thing in a chocolate glaze — which, hopefully, is usually. And don’t fear, you’ll have loads of sweet left for snacking.
