S'mores Trifle

I adapted this recipe from one I saw in my mom's All You magazine.  Have you seen the Cool Whip frosting they have recently come out with?  I have bought 3 containers of it, because they also came out with really good coupons for it, but I hadn't used any of it yet.  So when I saw this recipe I thought it would be a good way to use one of them.  Their version seemed unrealistic, since you are supposed to make the cake mix into 24 cupcakes, then split them in half, then put each of the bottom halves into 24 jelly jars, and then layer.  Who has 24 jelly jars laying around?  I bet not many people.  At the bottom of the recipe, it says "If you don't have 24 jelly jars, fill and top the split cupcakes on a platter instead."  That seemed like asking for a mess.  First of all, it would take a long time to do what they say to do 24 times, and secondly they would just all fall over, since it's cupcake, pudding, fluff, cupcake, frosting, mini marshmallows, melted semi-sweet chocolate, graham cracker pieces.  On each cupcake.  Someone might be laughing somewhere at the thought of people doing that.  So I adapted it into a trifle recipe.  You'll see.

S'mores Trifle
1 pkg chocolate cake mix
1 pkg (3.9 oz) instant chocolate pudding
1 cup milk
1 jar (7 oz) Marshmallow Creme (I just used a bunch of fluff, enough to cover, and I didn't measure the amount)
1 tub Cool Whip chocolate frosting, thawed
1 square semi-sweet baking chocolate
1/2 cup mini marshmallows
4 graham crackers, broken into pieces (this would make it look s'mores-y, but I skipped them)

Heat oven to 350.  Prepare cake batter and bake as directed for a 9x13 cake.  Cool completely in pan on wire rack.

Beat pudding mix and milk with whisk for 2 minutes.  Refrigerate until ready to use.

Cut the cooled cake into cubes.  Put half of the cubes on the bottom of a trifle dish (I used my Pampered Chef one, and it was the perfect size...any smaller and you might not fit all the cake cubes, but you could always use fewer cake cubes if you had to).  

Spread pudding on top of cake, smoothing to edges.  Cover pudding layer with a layer of fluff (the most challenging thing I've done this week, but I managed).  Cover fluff layer with remaining cake cubes.  Spread thawed frosting over cake cubes (although a rocky landscape, it was not as hard as you might think, that frosting spread very easily).  

Melt chocolate square in microwave at 30 second intervals on high, and stir until melted.  Put into a ziploc bag, snip the corner, and drizzle the chocolate over the frosting.  Top with mini marshmallows and graham cracker pieces.  Refrigerate until serving.

We had friends over for dinner last night, so we had this for dessert.  We all really liked it.  4 adults and 3 kids, and we only got through about half of it.  So this would be good for a crowd.  It was quite good, and even though the top layer was thick frosting, it wasn't too sweet.  It tasted like you would think chocolate cool whip would taste, maybe a bit thicker than that but not really sweeter than that.  A yummy ending.