making my own grey stuff

oh, facebook.  always bringing me all sorts of great ideas to try out at home.  

remember the grey stuff gateau the old lady and i had at disneyland a couple of weeks ago?  well, i came across a post that offered up a copycat recipe for it using some pretty easy-to-find ingredients. and so of course you know i had to go for it.

here's a list of the ingredients:

• instant pudding mix - vanilla and chocolate
• milk
• oreos
• cool whip
• powdered sugar
• red velvet cake mix
• shortbread or sugar cookies
• white chocolate ball-shaped sprinkles

see?  easy, right?  i enlisted the old lady's help to make the vanilla pudding base.  she just had to mix 1 1/2 cups of milk with the box of vanilla pudding mix and then put it in the fridge to chill.  and then we ran out of time until the next day when the bean got home from school.  i put her to work dropping 15 oreos into the food processor and then grinding them into crumbs.

mix those into the vanilla pudding until it's well blended, like this:

cool whip gets mixed in next, along with 3 tablespoons of powdered sugar (to help stiffen up the mixture) and 2 tablespoons of that chocolate pudding mix.

it looks like this when you're done:

and then that goes into the fridge to chill for at least half an hour while you take the spatula and do this:

the lady in the youtube video found some scalloped sugar cookies at the grocery store, but i decided to just make my own shortbread cookies at home.  i used a really simple recipe that took just four ingredients:  flour, sugar, vanilla extract and butter.  and then i used a box mix to make the mini cupcakes - i actually only made half of the box and still had a good two dozen mini cupcakes when all was said and done.  so what i decided to do was to freeze most of them so that we could just take them out and make them whenever we wanted to.  

i forgot to buy the raspberry jelly that goes into the gateau, but that's okay.  i decided to try assembling one as soon as all of the pieces were ready to go, and because i'm a goofball i thought it would be fun to take a time-lapse video of the process.  so i set up my phone on my selfie stick and wedged it into the space between the counter and the oven, got all of my pieces in place, and hit record.  here's how it ended up:

best three seconds you've ever watched on video, amirite?  but if you blinked you totally missed it, so here's a picture of the finished product.

not too bad compared to the original, right?

huh.  now that i look at the original again i see lots of differences.  but still...for an amateur i'm gonna call it a win.  and the girls agreed - they thought it was pretty delicious.  

nothing else matters after that, i'd say.  i win!