You've Got to Taste This Turtle Cake!

To enter my recently concluded Taste This! cookbook giveaway, readers had to vote for which dish I ought to try next from the Taste This! cookbook. Here are the results:

Pear Walnut Salad - 2 votes
Black Bean Soup - 1 vote
Potato Souffle - 5 votes
Linguine & Brie - 3 votes
Stuffed Bell Peppers - 4 votes
Divine Chicken Curry - 3 votes
Beef Stroganoff - 3 votes
Island Style Carrot Cake - 4 votes
Chocolate Pecan Turtle Cake - 6 votes
Peach Cobbler - 3 votes

From a statistical viewpoint, the votes seem fairly even across the board -- multiply each number there by about 20 million and you'd have the election tallies for all the Philippine presidential elections in history (kidding!). Not surprising, since all those dishes sound delicious.

However, there must be a winner. And after trying it out, I have to say that the Chocolate Pecan Turtle Cake, which narrowly edged past the Potato Souffle by 1 vote, is indeed a Winner. That caramel-pecan-chocolate filling is The Best cake filling I've ever tasted! The cake itself was fairly dry, but I'm blaming that on the cake mix I used (next time I'll add pudding mix or yogurt to the cake mix to moisten it).

The Pea has asked me to bake this for her birthday next Monday but she wants me to turn it into an ice cream cake. I'm willing to make the extra effort since the cake itself is so easy to make; my kids did practically everything themselves. The Pea made the caramel filling all by herself, and the boys made the cake from a cake mix, so all I had to do was open packages, handle the hot stuff, watch out for accidents and major spills, and wash the dishes afterwards. Maybe some Haagen Dazs Dulce de Leche on top of this Chocolate Pecan Turtle Cake would do the trick... (*wipes saliva from mouth*).

To all you disappointed Potato Souffle fans, don't worry. I ended up trying the Potato Souffle too (I'll post a review on that soon). In fact I'll probably end up trying all those dishes at some point!