Holiday Peppermint Bark Trifle

 Alec and I had an idea to make up a special holiday trifle cake for Christmas Eve last year.  Trifle cakes tend to be a bit hit with our family.  We combined chocolate cake with white chocolate peppermint pudding, some cool whip, and peppermint bark for a delicious dessert! 

Ingredients for the Trifle:

1- 11 ounce  package Nestle Tollhouse morsels in white chocolate

1 cup peppermint candy canes or soft peppermints crushed into bite sized or smaller pieces (it's a matter of preference here; I don't like the grittiness of hard candy cane "dust" and prefer the soft peppermints)

Chocolate cake (from a mix is fine; though Alec did make his from scratch!): you need just 1- 8 or 9 inch cake round per trifle so I usually pop the other one in the freezer for another trifle recipe on another day. 

2  packages instant white chocolate pudding + milk needed to make pudding

1- 8 ounce package cool whip; thawed

Directions: We usually make this in 2 days; one day to make the bark and the cake then we set both aside to cool and assemble the next day. 

First step is to make the peppermint bark.  We melted the bag of chocolate chips in the microwave using 30 second intervals and stirring.  When it was all melted, we poured the chocolate onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and spread into a thin layer. Sprinkle HALF of the peppermint pieces along the melted chocolate and let harden.  Then break into pieces like those shown below.

You won't use all these pieces on the cake but we just put the rest out on a cookie platter with some other sweet treats and watched it all disappear. 

Second step is to make the cake. Mix up a batch of your favorite chocolate cake mix following the recipe on the box or your favorite chocolate cake recipe and set both rounds aside to cool completely.  You do not want warm cake melting the pudding or the cool whip! 

Step 3 is to make the pudding.  Following the directions on the box for soft set pudding we mixed up both boxes together in the bowl of our stand mixer.

Once the pudding was soft set we added in the remaining 1/2 cup of peppermint and folded the candy pieces in throughout the pudding. 

Then in our trifle bowl we crumbled a layer of chocolate cake using approximately 1/2 of 1 cake round.  Then we layered 1/2 the pudding mixture and topped it with 1/2 the Cool Whip.  We repeated all 3 layers and finished off the cake with a few pieces of the peppermint bark.

It was delicious!!  

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