In college, I started making this cake for my birthday, and then for everyone else’s birthdays, because the glaze is revelatory. The chocolate and caramel together make it stickier and more complex than icing, but the nougat keeps it from becoming as rich as ganache. If you can melt anything in a saucepan, you can make this. And pouring it over a cake is so much easier, and just as visually stunning, as frosting the whole thing with buttercream. (I’m sorry, but no matter the style, buttercream tastes like nothing.) It worked in college because I had a shared dorm kitchen and minimal supplies. But even now, with a stand mixer and more than one bowl at my disposal, I don’t think cake gets much better than this.
The original recipe calls for Milky Way bars, but the formula adapts to plenty of other chocolate candy. Snickers and 3 Musketeers would work similarly, as would bite-sized Krackle or 100 Grand. Twix or Kit Kat, with their cookie and wafer elements, might be more difficult to melt but could also give you a more varied texture. Byrn also has a recipe for an Easy Hershey Bar Swirl Cake. You can experiment, and if it doesn’t work with a certain candy, you’ve barely wasted any ingredients.
You don’t even have to make the cake recipe in the book. This method works on practically any cocoa-friendly cake, on ice cream, or anytime you need to drizzle something in a chocolate glaze — which, hopefully, is often. And don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of candy left for snacking.
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