Banana Pudding Poke Cake, or How To Please Your Father In Law

I love sweets. We've established this, yes? My slight obsession with desserts and confections and baking and everything that comes with it? Good. It's very important.

Have we also talked about my time spent on pinterest? I love that site. And by love, I mean I can lose about five hours of time whilst perusing it.

Where is this going, you might be asking. Well, recipes and pinterest seem to go together like peas and carrots, bread and butter, green olives and ice cream. (Is that last one just me? Okay, noted.) That's basically 50% of the site, really. The other 50% consists of people who have too much time and patience with which to do their nails, workout plans that just make me want to eat more, collections of "dream wardrobes" that no one will ever make enough money to actually purchase, and crafts I'll never have time to replicate. But I'm mostly there for the food, as with any shindig.

A while back--okay, a LOOOOONG while back, there some a get together at my mother-in-law's place. I really can't even remember how long ago, but I'm pretty sure it was in between Thanksgiving and Christmas... I volunteered to bring a dessert, and I had one that I really wanted to try from Pinterest!

Have you ever heard of a poke cake? I'd seen them all over the interwebs and was intrigued.

I used this recipe, but you could just as easily make your own cake instead of using a box mix, make your own homemade pudding, and make homemade whipped cream as well. Since I needed this to be snappy though, I used boxed mixes. (Intentionally leaves out the part of the story where she tried to do a homemade cake, but she dropped the pan on the floor and fed the not-so-broken-not-so-dirty pieces to herself and Wee One...)

When you do is mix up your cake batter and bake it according to your recipe.

When it's finished baking, take the pan out of the oven and grab either a wooden spoon, a plastic spoon, or a drum stick if your husband happens to be a drummer. You don't have to wait for the cake to cool down before poking tons of holes all over it, making sure to get down to the very bottom of the pan.

After you've made all of your holes, you can begin to mix up your pudding.

You're going to want to pour the pudding over the hole-y cake as soon as it's mixed up, so that it's still pourable and not as thick as you'd want it if you were just eating pudding.

Make sure to use your spoon to really smooth the pudding over the cake, and slam the pan down on the counter a few times to get the pudding to really settle into the holes. After you've gotten all the pudding spread over the cake, you can then let it cool in the fridge for a bit. Once it's cool, grab your whipped topping and start spooning and spreading over the top.

But whatever you do, don't, I repeat DON'T use your vanilla wafer cookies to scoop the remaining whipped topping out of the container and then eat the now-whipped-topping-coated cookie. That would just be unseemly.

When you're ready to serve the cake, grab your bag of (hopefully still there) vanilla wafer cookies and crumble some over the top of the whipped topping. You want them to still be firm, not soggy, so save this step for the last minute.

Serve with a tall glass of milk and enjoy your poke cake!

Until next time, Kitchen Comrades!