| An easy cake to whip up, but some structural problems.
Starting with a chocolate cake mix, you add additional cocoa, some oil, eggs, vanilla, and of course, buttermilk. The batter was lovely, it baked up well, and even came out of the pans intact.
The problem was that the cake was extremely light. So light and tender that it couldn't support the frosting. The uncut cake was fine, but each slice self-destructed, and the half-cake that is left is collapsing. The frosting isn't that heavy, and I've never seen this problem before.
The problem might be my altitude - and it would be interesting to hear about the experience of baking this cake at sea level.
We frosted this with peppermint buttercream frosting, an awesome combination, and prepared it for our daughter's 13th birthday (cake 2 for this birthday, another yet to come). |
| This is a delicious coffee cake, and the family is deeply divided on whether it earned a "5" or a "4". You sprinkle blueberries over the cake batter, then a streusel topping. As it bakes, the blueberries sink in. An unsuspecting recipient of this cake would get a very pleasant surprise, indeed, when biting into it.
Our only comments are that the cake took about 10 minutes extra to cook, and that the toppings sunk in an uneven manner. At first this seemed to be a bad thing, but in the end, it simply gave the slices a bit of variety, and all pieces sampled were very good. |
| A standard buttercream - butter, powdered sugar, milk and vanilla. Its a good recipe, easy to follow, and simple. It is dependable. It is delicious. Shouldn't you be making some right now? |
| We had the buttermilk, and looked for a second cake to make that uses buttermilk. This recipe turns out to be exactly the same as the Devil's Food Cake later in the same cookbook, and reviewed on cookbooker. Its good, it was better with peppermint buttercream frosting than with chocolate cream cheese frosting.
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| The addition of chocolate to a cream cheese frosting seems rather strange. Its good on the cake, mostly because it isn't all that sweet, but when you scoop up a finger full (and face it, we all sneak a finger full, don't we?), it struck me as odd.
Nevertheless, it did well for my daughter's FOURTH birthday cake this week. Well, I guess you only become a teenager once.
We put this on a buttermilk devils food cake, and it was nice, but I think I preferred the peppermint buttercream frosting from the same book. |
| This is an easy cake to whip up - it uses a cake mix, plus orange juice, eggs, etc. The recipe also calls for a glaze that is made from fresh OJ and orange zest and confectioners sugar.
I liked that we could use seasonal produce (of course, not grown locally), and use of a mix as the base makes this really, really easy to prepare. The glaze was especially fantastic.
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| This cake is very good. The batter was a little thinner then I thought that it would be. But it still baked great and tasted even better. I would have given it a five but the batter just did not look right. This cake was great and lived up to its name by humming in my mouth. |
| Excellent creamy frosting with amazing pops of peppermint. This is really a standard buttercream frosting, but two ingredients elevate it - 1/2 C ground up peppermint candies and 2T peppermint schnapps.
The appearance was quite lovely - a pale pink with spots of color from the candies. Be careful to not totally pulverize the candies, small shards look the best.
This was used to frost a chocolate cake (see my other review), and was prepared as the second birthday cake for my daughter, who turned 13 recently. |
| For a cake mix, this was great. You work with a spice cake mix, and add a vanilla pudding mix, canned pumpkin, oil, eggs, and spices. 13 daughter prepared this herself, cooked it as a sheet cake, and brought it to her gym to share with her team mates. I think this is birthday cake number three. |
| This cake was better than excellent! We decided to just skip the bottle of food coloring so we just added a little more water to make up for the liquid loss. The cake was not the typical red-black color, and instead brown. But it was moist, light, and not overly sweet, in fact, it was this delicious. We didn't bother with frosting. |
| Good lemon flavor with an awesome lemon glaze.
This recipe happens to also be my MIL's lemon cake recipe - and a long time family favorite.
In this book, one is instructed to bake the cake in a bundt pan. Instead, we used a 9 X 11 pan. We then punctured the top, and poured on the thin glaze, and we end up with a moist cake with zips of glaze that soaked in.
An easy cake, with jello mixed in with a regular cake mix, and four eggs for richness. Don't forget the lemon zest - it gives an excellent zing. |
| A rich, moist cake that helps to use up that zucchini.
If you are worried that the zucchini will be too assertive, don't worry - it adds only color and moistness, and perhaps nutrition. This was simple to make - a cake mix, spices, oil, eggs, spices, and 2C grated zucchini. We substituted greek-style yogurt for the sour cream, and we skipped the frosting. We baked this in a bundt. It was delicious, but so rich that you really didn't need a second slice. |
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