I had some friends over for an end of summer barbeque on Saturday, and I always make my own desserts, and I try to make almost everything from scratch. I made a nacho dip, spinach dip, potato salad, and coleslaw, all recipes that I’ve made before. My husband made homemade burgers for the first time for the people that eat them (not me). But I needed to try something new. So I went with dessert.

I’ve always had a lot of success with recipes on www.Kraft.ca, so I browsed that site for something potentially delicious that would be pretty easy too. I didn’t want something too complicated as I knew I would be making several other things in addition to be cleaning the house on Saturday before my friends came over.

What I found was a Chocolate Cluster-Peanut Butter Cake. It was pretty easy. And the ingredients aren’t terribly exotic or hard to find or
anything. In fact the only things that I didn’t have on hand were enough eggs and the Cool Whip.  I always have peanut butter, milk, and oil at home. And I had bought some cake mixes and pudding mixes when they were on sale a little while ago, and bought some peanuts for a rice pilaf I made a few weeks ago that was terrible.

Ingredients

So this recipe met all of my major requirements – easy, tasty, delicious, and cheap!

I’ve frosted quite a few cakes in my days, and I know that I always make a terrible mess of things when I do, so I’ve learned a trick. I always put a few pieces of wax paper underneath after I put the cake down that I can just pull out out once I’m done. That way I can get the icing all over the place and it still looks like I didn’t afterwards. As you can see below, I can make quite the mess at times.

Icing the Cake

I especially liked the little nut cluster garnishes. Quite cute and it gave it character.

The only thing I would do differently next time would be to wait a little longer to frost it. I frosted it about 2 hours before everyone came, and before they even got here, the clusters were falling off. So I just moved them and put them closer to the top. Easy fix!

Yummy Cake!

And I was right, this was spectacular! I would absolutely make this again!

Happy Cooking!