The Tastykake Peanut Butter Kandy Kakes are as traditional to the cuisine of southeastern PA as the Philly Cheesesteak and pretzels. I ate my fair share growing up, enough to know they're heavenly. As an adult, however, I avoid processed foods like this altogether. They can call it whatever fancy name they want and use a fun logo, but all I see is "Toxic Chemicals with Zero Nutritional Value." If we can't pronounce the ingredients, it's not food.
We were talking about dessert-y items to make recently, and my son brought up Kandy Kakes. He suggested we make them from scratch - I was totally down with that! Here's how we did it....
Homemade Candy Cakes
- Find a yellow cake mix recipe to make from scratch. We used this gluten-free version from food.com.
- Bake in a thin layer in a 1" jelly roll pan. ***I put all our batter in one pan, however, I think it would be better to divide the batter into 2 pans for a thinner cake.
- When the cake comes out of the oven, immediately drop dollups of natural/no sugar added peanut butter (or almond butter or sunflower butter or cashew butter...whatever rocks your world) all over the top. It will start to melt, and then you can gently spread it to cover the top of the cake completely. This will be a thin, thin layer.
- Freeze, pan & all, for a couple hours.
- After a couple hours, melt your chocolate over a double boiler. We used 3 Green & Black's Organic Milk Chocolate Bars and some Sunspire dark chocolate cacao chips we had leftover.
- Remove the cake from the freezer when the chocolate is ready to go. Cut into small squares. Ours are 2" x 2" - but I'd go even smaller next time. Bite size would be better!
- Poke one of the sides with a fork and dip sideways into the melted chocolate, covering one half. Like fondue! You can sorta spin the excess off or let it drip, but work fast. You might have to refreeze if the peanut butter gets too soft as it might pull away from the cake when it's dipped into the chocolate.
- Put onto parchment-covered cutting board or other flat surface.
- When you have a batch done, put back in the freezer to re-harden the chocolate.
- Store at room temp.
- nom nom nom nom - I wish I could pluck these off the computer screen and eats 'em!
The result is obviously not exactly like a Kandy Kake, but it tastes great! We have no problem adjusting our palates to ensure we're eating what we want to eat.
