Surprise Spring Cookies and Cream Cake

This beautiful Cookies and Cream Cake has a secret spring surprise inside! Made with rich chocolate cake and vanilla buttercream, crushed Oreos add the beautiful effect to this spring speckled egg cake.

This beautiful Cookies and Cream Cake has a secret spring surprise inside! Made with rich chocolate cake and vanilla buttercream, crushed Oreos add the beautiful effect to this spring speckled egg cake. 

This beautiful Cookies and Cream Cake has a secret spring surprise inside! Made with rich chocolate cake and vanilla buttercream, crushed Oreos add the beautiful effect to this spring speckled egg cake.

Spring is here at last! And what better way to celebrate than with a cake?

A surprise cake!

You heard me.

Inside this unassuming speckled egg cake is a veritable cascade of delicious chocolate eggs that will both surprise and delight! And it’s so much easier to make than you think.

Adding the Oreo cookies not only makes the cake ‘speckled’, but it transforms the cake into a cookies and cream cake!

First bake your cakes. This recipe was perfect for four layers of 6 inch cakes, but you’d need to double the recipe for anything larger than 8 or 9 inches. And yes, you will need at least 3 layers to make this work, preferably 4!

I line my cake pans with parchment paper on the bottom to make sure they don’t stick, and have that perfectly flat bottom. Once you’ve filled the pans, bang them against the counter a couple times to get rid of any air bubbles!

This beautiful Cookies and Cream Cake has a secret spring surprise inside! Made with rich chocolate cake and vanilla buttercream, crushed Oreos add the beautiful effect to this spring speckled egg cake.

I do adore 6″ pans, they’re so cute!

This beautiful Cookies and Cream Cake has a secret spring surprise inside! Made with rich chocolate cake and vanilla buttercream, crushed Oreos add the beautiful effect to this spring speckled egg cake.

Toss your Oreos in the freezer for about 15 minutes, this will make them easier to smash (arguably the most fun part of making any cake). You can either put them in a food processor, or toss them in a ziplock bag and smash them with a rolling pin. Either way, you want them to be crumbs!

This beautiful Cookies and Cream Cake has a secret spring surprise inside! Made with rich chocolate cake and vanilla buttercream, crushed Oreos add the beautiful effect to this spring speckled egg cake.

(Please note that photo is not accurate for the amount, I wanted to make extra! But they should be just that crumbly!)

Mix that into your buttercream.

For the ‘robin’s egg’ colour, it should be mostly sky blue with a tiny tiny bit of leaf green. It will look like a beautiful speckled robin’s egg!

Between the chocolate layers and the Oreo infused vanilla buttercream, you’ll have the perfect cookies and cream cake!

Level your cakes (I use this method), and cut the middle out of two of them. I use a small bowl as a template.

This beautiful Cookies and Cream Cake has a secret spring surprise inside! Made with rich chocolate cake and vanilla buttercream, crushed Oreos add the beautiful effect to this spring speckled egg cake.

Now frost one of them,…

This beautiful Cookies and Cream Cake has a secret spring surprise inside! Made with rich chocolate cake and vanilla buttercream, crushed Oreos add the beautiful effect to this spring speckled egg cake.

… and flip it upside down on the bottom layer.

This beautiful Cookies and Cream Cake has a secret spring surprise inside! Made with rich chocolate cake and vanilla buttercream, crushed Oreos add the beautiful effect to this spring speckled egg cake.

Frost the top of that one, and stack the other hollow cake layer on top. Fill it with eggs!

This beautiful Cookies and Cream Cake has a secret spring surprise inside! Made with rich chocolate cake and vanilla buttercream, crushed Oreos add the beautiful effect to this spring speckled egg cake.

Frost the top of that, and stack your last layer on top. No one will ever know!

This beautiful Cookies and Cream Cake has a secret spring surprise inside! Made with rich chocolate cake and vanilla buttercream, crushed Oreos add the beautiful effect to this spring speckled egg cake.

Now for my absolute favourite cake decorating trick: the crumb coat. Seriously, this is a LIFE-SAVER. This chocolate cake is incredibly moist, and can be very crumbly. We’re going to cover the whole cake in a very thin layer of icing, sealing in all the crumbs. Then pop it in the fridge for 30 minutes or so so that the buttercream hardens a bit. That way when you frost it later, you can get it beautifully smooth with no crumbs!

This beautiful Cookies and Cream Cake has a secret spring surprise inside! Made with rich chocolate cake and vanilla buttercream, crushed Oreos add the beautiful effect to this spring speckled egg cake.

Pull out of the fridge and frost the rest! Add some more chocolate eggs on top.

This beautiful Cookies and Cream Cake has a secret spring surprise inside! Made with rich chocolate cake and vanilla buttercream, crushed Oreos add the beautiful effect to this spring speckled egg cake.

And there you are, a beautiful spring cake with an intriguing surprise!

This beautiful Cookies and Cream Cake has a secret spring surprise inside! Made with rich chocolate cake and vanilla buttercream, crushed Oreos add the beautiful effect to this spring speckled egg cake.

Just a tip, in order to cut it, cut through the first layer, pull the knife out a little bit and cut through the other two layers, and then push it back in to cut the last layer – don’t try to cut through the eggs!

This beautiful Cookies and Cream Cake has a secret spring surprise inside! Made with rich chocolate cake and vanilla buttercream, crushed Oreos add the beautiful effect to this spring speckled egg cake.

It’s a show-stopper of a dessert, perfect for Easter or any other spring parties you might want to impress at! Surprise cakes never fail to bring a smile.

Surprise Spring Cookies and Cream Cake
This beautiful Cookies and Cream Cake has a secret spring surprise inside! Made with rich chocolate cake and vanilla buttercream, crushed Oreos add the beautiful effect to this spring speckled egg cake.
Course: Dessert
Servings: 1 4 layer 6"-round Cake
Author: Cristina
Ingredients
The recipe below will make four 6-inch round layers, double the recipe for four layers of 8-inch rounds or higher.
Cocoa Fudge Cake
  • 1⅔ cups all-purpose flour or 2 cups cake flour
  • cups white sugar
  • cups cocoa
  • ½ cups vegetable oil
  • cups buttermilk (OR 2 Tbsp vinegar in 1½ cups milk)
  • tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 2 eggs
Vanilla Buttercream
  • 1 cup butter
  • 3-4 cups sifted powdered sugar
  • 1 tbsp vanilla extract
  • 3-4 Tbsp milk or heavy cream (I always use cream with this recipe!)
  • 5-6 Oreo cookies
  • Sky blue food colouring + leaf green food colouring
Filling & Topping
  • ~ 1 cup chocolate eggs
  • Anything else you want to decorate the top! I used 3 Cadbury Cream Eggs.
Instructions
Chocolate Cake
  1. Preheat oven to 350°, and cut out four 6-inch rounds of parchment paper to line the bottom of your pans.
  2. Mix all of the cake ingredients together in the order they're listed on medium first, scraping the sides occasionally. Then turn it up to high and let it go for 3 minutes, again, scraping the sides occasionally.
  3. Divide the batter into 4 equal parts, and pour them into your pans. Pop those in the oven for 25-30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean.
  4. Let cool 10 minutes, then remove from the pans onto a cooling rack.
  5. Set aside. Do not assemble or frost the cake until the cake is completely cool.
Oreo Vanilla Buttercream
  1. Put your Oreos in the freezer for at least 15 minutes. This will make it easier to smash later!
  2. Mix all ingredients together in a mixing bowl, scraping the sides occasionally, then turn up the speed to high, and beat for a minute. The frosting should be light and fluffy. It needs to be very easy to spread, so add a little more cream if it's too stiff.
  3. Add your food colouring in a bit at a time. You will need mostly sky blue, and a tiny bit of leaf green. I eyeballed it, and it ended up being about 1/4 tsp of blue to the end of a toothpick dipped in green.
  4. Smash your Oreos into crumbs. You can do this in the food processor or put the cookies in a ziploc bag and smash them with a rolling pin.
  5. Mix them into the buttercream.
Assembly
  1. Level your cakes. There are many tutorials online (see my link above), but you want to make sure they are FLAT.
  2. Take two of the layers, and cut a whole in the centre of them. I use a bowl as a template. You want to make sure there is a wide enough border that they will be strong enough to support the top layer, at least an inch and a half thick.
  3. Using a spatula, frost the top of one of the hollow layers. Place it upside down on the bottom layer of the cake. Frost the top of that one, and add the other hollow layer on top. It should look like a well (see the pictorial above!). Add the chocolate eggs into the centre. Frost the top again, and add the final layer on top.
  4. Frost the outside of your cake with a very thin layer of buttercream to lock all those crumbs in!
  5. Pop it in the fridge or freezer for about 30 minutes to harden the crumb coat seal it. We don't want any crumbs on our final product!
  6. Bring it out of the fridge or freezer and frost the rest with a nice thick layer of buttercream.
  7. Decorate as you would like!

 

Pin the recipe for this Surprise Spring Cookies and Cream Cake for later!

This beautiful Cookies and Cream Cake has a secret spring surprise inside! Made with rich chocolate cake and vanilla buttercream, crushed Oreos add the beautiful effect to this spring speckled egg cake.

About the author

Cristina

An avid lover of all things East Coast and delicious, Cristina blogs at I Say Nomato, a site dedicated to exploring and inventing allergy-friendly food. When she's not experimenting in the kitchen, she can be found curled up with a good book or planning her next adventure.