Box Cake Becomes Bakery Cake – Delicious!

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Are you tired of the same old same old cake designs at your local grocery store bakery?  Sure if you go to a specialized baker you have alot more flexibility but most of us just go to our local grocer and grab a cake.  Our daughter was turning 14 and I wanted to do something different for her.  She has her horse and we spend every day (or most days) at the barn caring for our horses.  Although she rides English – I did find this western boot cake mold!

But it just won’t do to make a plain old cake mix.  I really wanted the rich flavor and texture of a bakery cake – but at home.  It really is pretty easy to achieve.

First she chose a yellow cake – that is actually one of the easiest cake flavors to “doctor”.  I knew she wouln’t choose chocolate but wasn’t sure if she would opt for white, carrot, orange, strawberry or something like that.

Basically you take the cake mix – as you see, I even opted for a cheap generic box of cake.  No worries…  Prepare the cake with the number of eggs per the instructions – plus ONE.  This box called for three eggs, so I used four.

However much water the box mix calls for – swap it for milk.  Whole milk would be ideal but I used skim milk – worked just fine.

Add a box of pudding.  Since she chose yellow cake, I added french vanilla pudding mix.  If she would have opted for white – I would have added white chocolate pudding.

If the box calls for oil (this one did), you can either keep the oil or swap that for melted butter.  I kept the oil in this cake but in others, I have used butter.

And that’s that – Decorate it however you’d like.  My mother in law had all these sugar cowboy hats so we added them as well as a special princess angel and of course, candles…

She loved it!  Our daughter was born on Superbowl Sunday (half time) 2005.  Usually she wants some sort of football themed cake so this was quite different and she loved it.