Using Up Stale Cake or Cookies for a Crumb Crust

After my husband's birthday, we were left with about 5 pieces of stale cake. The tops were dried out, but the main cake portion was still moist.  I decided to scrape off the top part of the cake and the icing and I crumbled the remaining stale cake into a baking dish. 

Note: I made this whole recipe up as I went along, so feel free to do the same and change whatever you want to suit your own personal tastes. Use any pie filling that appeals to you. Also, stale cookies would definitely work for this instead of cake if that's what you have.

Don't forget that after you create your stale cake or stale cookie crumbs, you can put them into an airtight container or Ziploc bag and freeze them to use on another day.

Because the pieces were still moist, I put the dish in the oven and baked it until the pieces were pretty dried out.  In this case, if your cake was more dried out to start with, you could skip this step. When the cake was more on the crispy side, I took it out of the oven and dumped the pieces into my food processor. Then I turned it on and crushed them into fine crumbs. 

If you don't have a food processor, you could put the pieces into a gallon-sized Ziploc bag and crush them with a rolling pin or kitchen mallet. 

This is what it looked like after I was done with the food processor:

It looked a lot like crushed Oreos or chocolate cookies.  The crumbs were dry and tiny.  Then I mixed the crumbs with a bit of melted butter (or margarine would work too), and created a chocolate crumb crust, which I pressed into the bottom of the dish.  I guess I could have just smashed the cake from the very beginning. That would be another option, but your crust would have a different texture. It's up to you.

I used my electric mixer to beat one (8 oz) package of cream cheese and 1 tsp of vanilla until smooth and creamy. Then I folded in one container of whipped topping. I think I did add a dash of milk to make it more smooth, but I don't know how much it was. I eye-balled it. ;) 

I then smoothed my new creation into my dish and drizzled it with a tiny bit of melted caramel ice cream topping, because that's what I had. This is optional and you could use any flavor you like. I chilled my creation in the refrigerator and voila!  A yummy no-bake cheesecake for about $1.50 - 2.00.

Here's a picture of the side of the dish so you can see the crust. It actually was really, really tasty, and nobody in my family knew that I had used up stale cake for the crust. It was really easy and cheap and didn't take much time at all. My family ate the entire thing. I will definitely do it again.