Ingredients:
2 cups buttermilk
1 cup sugar
3 eggs
1 cup canola oil
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla paste
2 1/2 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup Dutch process cocoa
1 3.5-oz package Bahlsen Waffeletten Dark Chocolate cookies

for the glaze
1/4 cup buttermilk*
1/2 cup confectioners sugar

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350. Spray with baking spray or grease and flour one Bundt pan. Set aside.

Place the cookies in a resealable bag. Use your hands to crunch them into coarse crumbs (as pictured above). Set aside

In a large bowl or bowl of a stand mixer, beat together the buttermilk, sugar, eggs, oil and vanilla paste until smooth. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, baking powder and cocoa. With the mixer running, stream in the dry ingredients and beat until well-incorporated. Fold in 1/2 cup cookie crumbs. Scrape into prepared Bundt pan.

Bake for 50 minutes or until a thin knife inserted in the cake comes out with just a few damp crumbs.

Cool 10 minutes in the pan, then remove and cool completely on a wire rack.

Whisk together the glaze ingredients in a small bowl. Drizzle cake with glaze then sprinkle with remaining cookie crumbs.

*I use buttermilk my milkman delivers straight from the farm. It is very thick. If using store-bought buttermilk, you may need to add additional confectioners sugar to get to glaze consistency.

My thoughts:

German-based (but widely available here in the US)  Bahlsen recently invited me to enter their “Let the Good Times Roll” contest. I was invited to use their chocolate-dipped Waffeletten cookies to make a festive, easy-to-make birthday cake to celebrate the 125th birthday of Bahlsen. My own birthday just passed and I had been thinking a lot of about the birthday cakes I’ve had over years and thought it would be fun to try my hand at a cake incorporating cookies that I already loved.

To me birthday cakes are a simple, homemade affair. Growing up we always had a from-scratch chocolate or hot milk cake (who wants a cake mix cake for their birthday? Blah.) that my mom would often top with whatever toy we were into at the moment. I remember one pink cake topped with small My Little Pony “flutter pony” figures that I loved. No fancy, over-the-top icing or decorations and certainly no yucky fondant. I wanted to recapture that homey, free, happy feeling with this cake. I skipped My Little Pony toppers this time, but I created a cookie-studded cake so easy a kid could make it. Bundt cakes are my go-to for simple cakes these days because they don’t need to iced, plain or with a basic glaze is perfection. The cookies “melt” inside but provide a burst of chocolate flavor when you bite into them. The result: a moist, chocolate-y cake that is special enough for any birthday but doesn’t require a culinary degree to make!

Full disclosure: Bahlsen sent me two boxes of cookies to experient with and I hear I will also receive a Tiffany cake plate for my efforts at some point in the future.