gem mentioned to me that she’d like me to bake a cake for her birthday a few weeks ago. I’m not sure if she was expecting me to really do it or not, but I’d been wanting to bake a cake so I went for it. She likes turtle cookies, so I decided to make her a turtle cake, which is chocolate with caramel and pecans. I based it off the recipe Turtle Cake II from AllRecipes.com. I took the recommendations from the comments and used 1/4 cup butter and 2/3 cup evaporated milk instead of 3/4 cup butter and 1/2 cup evaporated milk. I also used a German chocolate cake mix that included pudding rather than one without as specified for the recipe. I don’t really even know the difference, but I couldn’t find one without. However, I actually felt bad about using a mix anyways. It seems like cheating. Oh well.

Here’s a shot of the middle layer of caramel, toasted pecans, and caramel. It’s spread atop the first layer of cake. Thanks to my friend, Hal, for recommending I toast the pecans first! It smelled great as they toasted.

It looked pretty tasty to me before I even frosted it.

Nevertheless, I frosted it and added some caramel decoration to the top.

I wrote a birthday message on it, but in retrospect, I chose a bad color.

I should have chosen something with a higher contrast against the dark chocolate.

I also added a few pecans to the top to give a better indication of what’s in the cake.

Of course, it needed some star candles too!

It turned out delicious. More importantly, gem liked it too. Success!