Birthday trifle - OR- "Take-it-easy birthday cake"

Just one week after my daughter's birthday is my husband's birthday. Luckily after all the get-togethers with different family members which all involved some kind of cake or muffin my husband was a bit fed up with cake by the time his birthday arrived. This meant I did not have to bake another cake! But since I thought no cake at all was a bit sad, too ... I was thinking about what to do?
Remember, that I had half a chocolate cake still sitting around from my daughters birthday cake. (There was one layer which I did not use in the end.) So I figured it would be perfect to make some trifle. I have only made this raspberry trifle so far (it's a german site with american recipes) - but this one I have made a couple times because I liked it so much. I already wanted to try a chocolate trifle for quite some time ... so this was THE opportunity. I read a few recipes on the web ... but in the end decided that I was not going to use a recipe. I just didn't want to bother and figured ... well, I just need to figure out what I want in there and layer it! Can't be that hard! :-)
So I decided to put the following inside

-chocolate cake (I broke it into pieces or cumbled it - did not bother with cutting)
-bananas (sliced those and put a bit of lemon juice on top so they would not brown so badly)
-whipped cream
-vanilla pudding (hubby loves vanilly pudding - if it would have been my choice I would have used chocolate)

I also wanted to use some kind of sauce but did not have any. I thought it would be very nice to soak the cake with some kind of alcohol ... but obviously - since I am pregnant and my daughter probably also wanted to try - this was not an option. I also was not too keen on cooking choc or caramel sauce and you can't easily buy this stuff around here. What I did have was a bowl of chocolate frosting sitting in the fridge. (I had used this to frost my daughter's birthday muffins.) So I got into some experimental mood .... and warmed the frosting up to make it soft again and put some sweetened condensed milk into it to make it more into a sauce. It was PERFECT!!! It got a really nice caramel like colour, tasted great and fit perfectly to the rest of the trifle ingredients.

I layered everything into a big glass bowl and let it sit over night. We had it in the morning for breakfast and it was VERY YUMMY!!!


And it was even better in the afternoon - it seems it gets better the more it sits! :-) Definitely a very easy and quick way to make a very very tasteful - and goood looking - dessert.
(Sorry, the trifle looks actually much better in reality - the pictures are not that great.)