Recipe: Peanut Butter and Chocolate Graveyard Dirt Cake

I’ll be honest: dirt cake has never really been my thing. Most versions involve pudding filled with fake flavoring, gobs of non-dairy whipped topping and Day-Glo gummy worms — a dream come true for kids or a big crowd of drunk dudes (more on that later), but I need a little more. Like two layers of homemade pudding, one lightly salted peanut butter, the other dark chocolate, that together taste like the grown up version of a Reese’s peanut butter cup, sandwiched between two layers of crumbled cookie.

And because it’s Halloween, and this is still a dirt cake, it’s topped with a fun mini graveyard, made with Nutter Butter cookies and whipped cream ghosts.

I am not officially the dirt cake expert in my house. That honor goes to my husband, Rob, who makes a giant dirt cake every summer for the annual crawfish boil he hosts with friends. Its ingredients are one store-bought chocolate sheet cake, several tubs of Kozy Shack pudding, a package of crushed Oreos and Cool Whip. He serves it in a giant plastic flower pot with flowers sticking out of the top and it is always a hit with the partygoers drunk on beer and crawfish tails.

I am the only naysayer. Every year I try to nudge him into swapping out one of the packaged ingredients for a homemade replacement (“How about whipped cream instead of Cool Whip? Please? I’ll whip it for you!”) and he keeps refusing, saying that everyone loves his dirt cake, so why would he change it? He’s right. His dirt cake is his dirt cake and he doesn’t need to change it.

This dirt cake, however, is my dirt cake, so I get to make it exactly how I like. And that means adapting one of my favorite peanut butter and chocolate layered pudding recipes, increasing the salt in the peanut layer and replacing the milk chocolate with imported dark chocolate for a richer flavor with more depth. Although making not one but two puddings from scratch is a good deal more difficult than opening a container of Kozy Shack, that doesn’t mean the process is actually difficult. Cornstarch-thickened pudding cooks up quickly, and once the pudding layers are poured over the bottom layer of chocolate cookie chunks, it’s waiting for them to chill in the refrigerator that is the killer.

If you plan on making the dirt cake for an occasion other than Halloween, you can skip the decorating — just sprinkle cookie crumbs over the top and serve it with whipped cream — but for a themed party, the Nutter Butter gravestones and whipped cream ghosts are a must. No matter how dressed up, it’s still dirt cake after all. It’s supposed to be fun!