OMG Oreos

Because I read a lot of food, baking and cupcake blogs, it's come to my attention that Americans are really good at the whole 'interesting flavours' thing. Seems like everyone is clamouring to make basil cupcakes, salted caramel cupcakes, almond and lavender cupcakes, and so on. None of this really happens in Australia, where people are much happier with the basic chocolate and vanilla. Those who are brave are going for...ooooohhh...lemon! I'd like to reintroduce some more interesting flavours to the Three Sweeties repetoire, but they've got to a) be something people will actually try and b) something which doesn't require different recipes. Basically, if I can take my key recipes and tweak them, I'm onto a winner.

Several recent blog posts have given me Oreos on the brain, and so last week I thought I'd play around with them a bit. An obliging client, a keen helper in NN, and a synagogue dinner for which I needed dessert set the scene.

I'm not posting a recipe for this, primarily because I didn't do anything spectacular ... and yet, the results were hugely popular, and really, really freakin' delicious. Using my standard chocolate cake recipe, my standard buttercream recipe, and some mad torting skills, I made an Oreo Layer Cake.

Simple, really - chuck a sleeve of Oreos into a bag, bash the shit out of them with a rolling pin (cackling all the while) and stir into vanilla frosting. Bake a decadent chocolate cake, torte into three layers, and slather with Oreo frosting inside and out. Layer it up, put some cut up Oreos on top and that's it. Next up, courtesy of a moment of NN genius - Tim Tam Cake. Same principal, just using Australia's favourite chocolate cookie rather than America's. I'm also planning on adopting the Baking Bites version, which is a vanilla cake swirled with pieces of Oreo and then topped with Oreo icing.

None of these are particularly original ideas, but all of them show how easy it is to take something boring and making it something fabulous...which is pretty much my baking philosophy anyway.