My son loves Oreos. They’re the thing he asks for when we need him to do something he doesn’t want to do, like take some medicine, or finish his French homework. So when it came to his birthday cake this year, he asked me for an Oreo cake, so I took to my kitchen, got experimenting and came up with this simple recipe for a three layer Oreo cookies and cream cake.

There are a lot of Oreos in this, and as we are trying to cut costs a bit, we used the Aldi version at a fraction of the cost. They’re really no different at all. I’ll leave it up to you if you want to use the real ones or the supermarket versions. This cake including the frosting used 5 packs of Oreos, which is slightly terrifying. You could use a little less if you feel that might be the right thing for you and your cake. 

For the frosting, I did experiment with making Oreo buttercream with butter, icing sugar etc, which worked fine, but the pre-made vanilla frosting really tasted like the inside of an Oreo, spread much more easily, and was just so much better in terms of flavour and texture. My advice would be to use the pre-made frosting and just stir the crushed Oreos through it.

If you usually make your cakes using a mixer, that’s fine, but I’d urge you to just fold the crushed Oreos through the cake batter, as mixing it with the food mixer changes the texture and look of the cake. It’s darker and denser, and somehow less appealing because of that. This is a three layer cake, because it was a celebration cake, if you want, you can cut the recipe by a third and make it a two layer cake and that’s fine too.

Oreo cookies and cream cake

Ingredients:
300g caster sugar
300g softened butter or margarine (I use Stork)
6 eggs, beaten
3 tsp vanilla extract
3 tbsp milk
300g self-raising flour
1.5 tsp baking powder
300g crushed Oreos

For the frosting:
600g vanilla frosting, I used M&S
200g crushed Oreos

Method:

Heat your fan oven to 190c. Grease three 20cm sandwich tins, I also lined the bottom of each tin with a circle of baking parchment. In a large bowl, beat your butter and sugar together until fluffy (I used a hand mixer). Add the eggs, milk and vanilla and combine, then add the flour and baking powder and mix together until you have a smooth batter.

Put your Oreos in a sturdy plastic bag and beat them into a rolling pin until they’re nicely crushed. You can also do this in a food processor if you feel like it. Fold in your Oreo crumbs, don’t be tempted to beat them in or mix them with your cake mixer, this makes the mixture a fairly uniform but unattractive dirty brown colour. If you fold them in, the colour and texture are much better!

Divide the mixture equally between the three tins. You can weigh them to make sure they’re fairly equal if you’d like. Bake in your pre-heated oven for around 20 mins until golden and they’re cooked. Remove from the tins and leave to cool on a cooling rack.

Leave your cakes to cool, preferably overnight before decorating them.

To make your frosting, scoop your vanilla frosting into a bowl and fold in your crushed Oreos. Again, if you beat them in the frosting will go a funny colour and texture, the less you play with this the better.

Your sponge layers may have a domed top, if you’re being a stickler for good looks, then you can carefully trim the top flat with a good knife. If this is for an occasion and not just for scoffing, I will trim the top layer, but turn it upside down, so the top of the cake is guaranteed to be perfectly flat.

I like a slightly rustic look to my cakes, so I used an offset palette knife to spread a generous slick of frosting between each layer and then cover the whole lot in the frosting. The cake was for a 12 year old, so the terrifying amount of sugar here wasn’t a problem, but if you wanted to cut down the sugar a bit, you could always just do an artistic swirl on the top. I decorated the cake with a few leftover (pah!) cookies and some crumbs. 

I made two of these cakes for his birthday. One was plain and simple, and the other one was turned into a Warhammer Purity Seal cake. Both cakes were a huge success and were gobbled down quickly by friends and family. Everyone loves Oreos, right?

If you enjoyed this recipe, you might also like to try this peanut butter Oreo ice cream.