The Hello Dolly Cake

The Premise

A Hello Dolly but make it CAKE.

Whether you know this dessert as a Magic Bar or a 7 Layer Bar or a Hello Dolly, the recipe is the same. A base made of melted butter (layer 1) and graham cracker crumbs (2) topped with chocolate chips (3), butterscotch chips (4), chopped walnuts or pecans (5), shredded coconut (6), and finally a healthy drizzle of sweetened condensed milk (7). Some people skip the butterscotch chips but that is 100% wrong—that’s a mystic bar, a 6 layer bar, a hey dolly. The hardest part about this dessert is smashing up graham crackers. Or, in my case, making sure you butter doesn’t pop all over the inside of your microwave. Mostly it just involves opening a lot of packaging and pouring things into a pan to get a mouthful of sugar.

My favorite.

Hello Dollies are my partner’s favorite dessert and I love weird and involved baking projects so the idea of taking a very simple, foolproof dessert and needlessly complicating it was completely up my alley. I wanted it to be a layer cake because that’s a little more awe-inspiring than a sheet cake and I thought it would allow for more variations. My first step was seeing if someone had already done this idea. I found a bundt cake version and a cookie cake version, both of which look AMAZING but not layer cakes.

My main guideline was that the 7 layers/components to a Hello Dolly must be represented in the final cake. Butter is kind of a given since it would, at the very least, be in the cake batter. Admittedly I’m giving myself a little leeway with the butter because 1) it’s not a standalone ingredient in the bar version and 2) I’m not putting pats of butter on my cake. I found several frosting recipes that use sweetened condensed milk and that seemed like a great option. That leaves chocolate, butterscotch, coconut, and either pecans or walnuts—I’m partial to pecan so that’s what I’m going with. I wanted to include these elements in thoughtful ways and avoid just sprinkling them on top of the cake in order to just check boxes.

Since there’s so many flavors and so many possible components of a layer cake, I made myself a bunch of lists so I could sort things out. I freaking love lists.

The Potential Flavors

HOO BOY, there were a ton of options for cakes and frosting and decorations. There’s a reason this list sat in my notes app for MONTHS before I finally gave it serious consideration over the summer (Yes I started writing this post in August of 2020. Yes it’s now 2021). The German chocolate frosting was a last minute edition. It’s something I never eat so I hadn’t thought to include it originally but then I realized it combined 2 elements—pecans and coconut—in one component and that seemed like a huge win. Plus, it had the potential to include the sweetened condensed milk element making it a 3 birds, 1 stone situation which I was ALL about.

But even with that potential winning frosting/filling, there’s just so many possible flavor options. At first I thought I would have to create all these individual elements and do a mega taste testing of each individual component + the various combos to figure out what would go best together for the final cake. And frankly that sounded awful. I mulled over this list for a long time before I finally decided to start putting potential cake combos together on paper and seeing what seemed to click.

The Potential Cakes

I thought these initial 3 combos were very solid but the longer I considered them, the more I worried about how much STUFF there was on the cake. Again, I wanted to avoid dumping a bunch of things on the exterior of the cake just to check all the boxes. I also realized that there was no chocolate frosting represented in any of the cakes and that didn’t feel right so I created another cake combo option.

This one really struck my fancy the longer I considered it. I really loved that you would see all the elements of a Hello Dolly represented on the outside of the cake without it just being some crazy explosion of STUFF.

Additionally, as a lover of all things butterscotch, I considered that adding butterscotch chips to the graham cracker cake batter might be a nice addition—for additional texture, creating a fun flavor combo, and because the more butterscotch the better. This is the cake that I decided to move forward with for an initial taste test.

The Research

So now that I had the cake more in focus, I needed to try it out and see what needed tweaking. Not wanting to end up with a million pans of cake and pounds of frosting, I thought that finding small batch recipes would be a great solution. Small batch desserts is Christine’s specialty on her blog, Dessert for Two and I bookmarked her German chocolate cupcakes for the frosting. Originally I’d also bookmarked her small batch chocolate cupcake recipe also for the frosting but the more I considered the chocolate frosting, the more I leaned toward doing a whipped chocolate ganache, both for the test and the final cake because I like how simple a ganache would be both in ingredients and method.

For the cake itself, this graham cracker layer cake recipe from Food52 looked really promising for the final cake and was easily able to be halved for the taste test. I could mix butterscotch chips into half the batter to try both versions to see which I liked best. Ganache is just a simple ratio of hot heavy cream to chocolate so I could make as much as I needed—tada.

Note: I know these tests leave out the sweetened condensed milk component but I had a German chocolate frosting recipe that used it waiting in the background for use in the final cake. For the initial combo tasting I just wanted a sense of how the general flavors worked together.

The Testing

I had my recipes, I had my plan, now I just needed to see if I had a potentially delicious cake or an absolute disaster. FUN!

After some consideration I decided to go with a whipped ganache for the frosting. Since it needs to be room temperature before whipping I made that first so it could cool while everything else came together.

Once the ganache was done I made the graham cracker cake, putting butterscotch chips in half the batter. I needed the test cakes to have at least 2 layers so I could sandwich the German chocolate frosting in between so I baked it in an 8″ square pan that I could cut it into 4 pieces.

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While the cake was doing its thing, I moved on to the German chocolate frosting. It felt too liquid-y but I hoped that chilling it in the fridge would help it firm up so it hung out there while I whipped the chocolate ganache until it was lighter in color and fluffy. For the final element, I made my butterscotch ganache which was suspiciously runny and I realized that I’d gotten the ratios off by doing the mental math in a rush.

At this point I was losing light and my partner had a commitment and the little oopsies were stacking up so I was feeling the stress. I cut 4 circles from the cake—2 from the “plain” side and 2 from the butterscotch chips side. The German chocolate frosting had firmed up some but was still really loose so I knew I was in for a mess trying to create these little cakes. OH WELL.

I put a blob of German chocolate frosting in between the two cake layers for each cake before I *tried* coating each one in the whipped ganache. Disaster. Since I’d punched out the cake layers they were super crumby, mixing in with the ganache and the German chocolate frosting oozed everywhere. This was when I realized that the aesthetics of these test cakes mattered not one iota because I just needed to know if the flavors were all compatible. So I drizzled my runny butterscotch ganache over the partially frosted cakes, spooned little blobs of the German chocolate frosting on top. I skipped the graham cracker crumbs because honestly I just forgot, whatever. My baby cakes were ready. They were hideous but they were ready.

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This was the moment of truth. We dug into both cakes and I truly couldn’t help but grin because HOLY SHIT I DID IT. With one bite you knew you were eating a Hello Dolly BUT AS A CAKE. We agreed that the graham cake with the butterscotch chips was the favorite over the plain cake. We also agreed that adding graham cracker pieces as an accent to get that crunchy element would absolutely nail the Hello Dolly experience.

The Final Cake

I decided to split up the cake into two days: baking the cake, making the German chocolate filling, and filling, stacking, and crumb coating the cake on day one. Make the chocolate ganache frosting, butterscotch ganache, and all the finishing touches on day two. Since this was a birthday cake, I wanted to give myself time to course-correct in case anything went wrong.

Since I had a bowl of the chocolate ganache frosting leftover from the test on Sunday, I decided I would use it to pipe some dams for the German chocolate filling between the layers just for some added security against oozing so I pulled that out of the fridge to come to room temperature. I made the filling first and transferred it into a bowl to cool while I moved on to the cake. I divided the batter into three 6″ cake pans and got them into the oven. I thought I was off to a great start until I realized about 10 minutes into the bake time that I’d forgotten to add the butterscotch chips to the cake batter and had to yank the pans out of the oven really quick to sprinkle some in. Luckily they seemed to turn out just fine so crisis averted.

I beat the room temp ganache with some extra heavy cream until it was fluffy again and transferred it into a piping bag. I’m pretty terrible at piping but thankfully everything went *smoothly* (ba dum tss) with filling and stacking the cake.

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I went back and forth on crumb coating but ultimately decided that I might as well use up the rest of the ganache frosting. I really overestimate how large 6″ cakes are because I had plenty to coat the entire cake. So much so that I wondered if I should just call it done and move on with the finishing touches but I ultimately decided I’d still do another small batch of ganache in the morning since the layer was so thin.

And first thing in the morning I had the chocolate ganache made, crushed up some graham crackers, and set out a bowl of butterscotch chips so that everything was ready. Once the ganache had cooled I whipped it for a couple of minutes and frosted my nicely chilled, still-not-leaking cake. I pressed the cracker crumbs around the bottom and I could really use some work on this party but I was getting more and more excited seeing the cake come together.

At this point I transferred the cake to its final resting spot on a stand before making the butterscotch ganache. I’m really bad at estimating when the ganache for a drip is at the exact right temperature—probably because I never use ganache drips—so it was still a touch too runny when I poured it over the cake but I’ll take the end result. All that was left to do was spoon a little blob of the German chocolate frosting on top.

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My Hello Dolly cake was done.

I really can’t believe how much this tastes like a Hello Dolly y’all. You taste every single element and it’s not a mess and it tastes really good as just a standalone cake. Like this whole thing seemed like such a weird and silly exercise. Why not just make a batch of Hello Dollies right? But it was so fun to plan and problem solve in order to attempt something I hadn’t seen done before and end up with the *exact* thing I was aiming for. I MADE A HELLO DOLLY CAKE! Not failing is super fun!

I still have a huge bowl of German chocolate frosting leftover—plus the little container from the test batch—so I might be making another cake here shortly.

No time to bask in my life-changing accomplishments, there’s more cake to be made.

Recipe/Technique Sources for the Hello Dolly Cake:

• Graham cake
• German chocolate frosting
• Whipped ganache frosting
• Butterscotch ganache