666 Cake Tricks!

Todays post is kind of a deep cut, going all the way back to when I first started blogging! I used to photograph step-by step recipes, Pioneer Woman style, and post them on my blog. No idea if anyone ever followed them, but I had fun making them.

Anyway, today I'm doing that again! I don't really bake, but for some reason I just out of the blue decided I wanted to try to make a cake. Now I don't have flour, or sugar, or cake ingredients, but I decided to get a cake mix, and use some Pioneer Woman tips and tricks, plus some that I'd seen on YouTube, to fancy it up a bit, and make it more homemade.

So the first thing I did was ignore just about everything on the box. I used whole milk instead of water, butter instead of oil, an extra egg, and a cup of applesauce. (Please excuse my terrible photos, I had to use my phone because my camera is still back home in Harlan, not to mention, the color seems to have been horribly desaturated in the upload.)

I mixed all the wet ingredients together, minus the butter. I used some of it to grease the pan, and the rest I melted on the stove. I didn't want it getting too hot and cooking the eggs, so I saved the melted butter for last. I mixed in the bag of dry ingredients into the wet, and then whisked it together. The box said to mix on medium speed for three minutes. Well, I don't actually own an electric mixer, so I had to mix that stuff by hand like a REAL Pioneer Woman! Mixing cake batter for three minutes is actually kind of an arm workout! While I mixed, I slowly added in the butter, as I figured by that time it was probably cool enough.

Once everything was mixed thoroughly, or at least as thoroughly as my non-Pioneer Woman arm could get it, I also stirred in a cup of chocolate chips. Actually, I didn't pay attention to how many chocolate chips I added, I just had a container that had been in my cupboard for like three years, and I thought this would be a perfect way to get rid of them. Bonus hack! Got ingredients you want to use up? Dump them into a cake!

I baked the cake following the instructions on the box, but I think I ended up adding 10-15 minutes to the cooking time. I kept checking on it with a chop stick, (I don't have toothpicks) but it wasn't done, so I just kept adding to the bake time. While the cake baked, the next step was to improve the frosting. Regular store-bought frosting is okay, but not great. Want to know how to fix that? More butter. I added half a stick, but I think a whole one would have been even better.

When the cake was done I let it cool awhile, but I broke one of the cardinal rules of cakes, and I frosted it while both the cake and the frosting were still warm. I thought it worked beautifully.

It was amazing.

So that was fun. I like to cook, but I generally don't bake. Partly because I really try not to eat this kind of thing too much, but it was still a fun change of pace for me. Now I have an entire cake to eat... Oh well! :)

Oh, incidentally, this was my 666th blog post, and this was a Devil's Food Cake.