Order 2 Popular Menu Items From Outback Steakhouse For The Best Off-The-Radar Dessert

Secret menus are an iffy proposition, and one we cannot wholeheartedly (or even part-heartedly) get behind if they involve creating a lot of extra work for restaurant employees. Menu hacks, on the other hand, are fine and dandy if all you're doing is ordering two or more menu items and arranging them yourself in whatever creative way strikes your fancy. One such dish is a chocolate caramel mug cake from our Outback Steakhouse "secret menu" roundup that can be made using two different desserts from that chain restaurant's menu. (No surprise here: One's chocolate; the other's caramel.)

What you do, if you should feel the need to make a pair of reconstructed desserts, is to order a Chocolate Thunder from Down Under and a salted caramel cookie skillet (which has a more generic name, hence the lack of capital letters). You will need to bug your poor server to the extent of asking for the desserts to come with a couple of extra vessels, though — mugs, if you want to be true to the name, although bowls would work just as well. Once you've acquired the necessary ingredients and equipment, chop up the cookie and brownie, stick some of both in your mugs along with whatever sauce there is, then divvy up any ice cream and whipped cream. Or, you know, you could just take alternate bites of both desserts, thus sparing yourself some mess and the server the need to deliver and collect extra dishes.

Not every Outback has the necessary ingredients to make this Mashed-endorsed mashup dessert. While some restaurants, such as the one in Polaris, Ohio, do have salted caramel cookie skillets on the menu, others, including the one in Greenfield, Wisconsin, do not. In Greenfield, the dessert menu lists New York-style cheesecake, carrot cake, butter cake in strawberry sauce, and brownie layer cake topped with Tim Tams (which are a Twix-like Australian cookie classic) in addition to the ubiquitous Chocolate Thunder from Down Under. If you're bound and determined to make a mug cake, you can always combine the butter cake and CTFDO in similar fashion to the chocolate caramel thingie described above, making for something like the Thunder and Lightning that Outback introduced as a new dessert a few years back. (Be forewarned: The T&L doesn't seem to be around anymore, perhaps for good reason.)

Yet another thing you could do, requiring no extra mugs be brought to the table, is order that Tim Tam cake and a cup of coffee. Eat the cake sans Tim Tams, then bite the corners off the cookies and use them as straws to drink the coffee, thus performing a Tim Tam slam. This feat could be performed with Twix, as well, only no one ever seems to do it — again, perhaps there's a reason. Still, secret menus are all about doing something "just because" even if it's not necessarily a good idea.