Blueberry Wine Cake

I made this dessert for a Memorial Day cookout with friends. It was refeshing, yummy and very easy to make. Since the glaze on the cake has wine in it that isn't cooked out, it is NOT a dessert for anyone under 21 years of age. At least not in the state of Indiana. I hope you enjoy this as much I do!

Ingredients:

1 box white cake mix
1 box (3 ounce) Berry Blue Jell-O mix
3/4 cup vegetable oil
1 cup "good" blueberry wine
4 eggs
1/2 cup pecans


Glaze:

1/2 stick butter - room temperature (cold butter won't work)
1/2 cup blueberry wine
1/4 box of powdered sugar (1/4 pound by weight)

DIRECTIONS:

Grease and flour the bottom of a bundt pan or other pan. Line bottom of pan with 1/2 cup of pecans. Mix all ingredients for the cake mix and pour over top of pecans. Bake at 350 degree for 50-60 minutes for bundt pan. Once cake is done, poke holes in the cake witha toothpick or fork and pour glaze mixture over hot cake. I like to use a skewer to poke the holes...more of the glaze gets into the cake that way. Once the cake had cooled, I filled the middle opening of the bundt cake with fresh blueberries.

**Note: Make sure glaze mixture isn't too warm and runny - like if you heated the butter in the microwave. I did this because my butter was cold and the glaze ingredients weren't mixing together right. This made it too runny and the glaze was so liquified that it mostly ran off the cake instead of slowly melting into the holes.

You can make this cake with just about any flavor of wine that you like. Just use the appropriate flavor of Jell-O to match the flavor of your wine as close as possible. If you use strawberry wine, then use strawberry flavored Jell-O, blackberry wine, you would still use the berry blue Jell-O, etc.

Red Velvet Twilight Cake

I made this lovely, blood red, red velvet birthday cake for the daughter of a friend last year. She's a HUGE Twilight fan. Just like me. Since she loves Twilight so much (we've had Twilight marathons) I thought it only appropriate to give her a really cool cake that I knew she'd love just as much as the movies. And to make it even cooler...more "vampire" like, I made red velvet cake. Alice and Jacob are her two favorite characters so I made sure to put "Team Alice" and "Team Jacob" on the cake along with Kierra's name and "Twilight." I painted them on in gold in the "Be Safe" script.

Naturally I HAD to take a picture of the inside of the cake as well. It was just too cool not to. Yes, I'm weird. And yes, I'm obsessed with vampire novels...and cake, lots of cake. I made a 16" round double layer cake for the bottom tier and the top is a 4 layer 8" square cake. I was going for some "WOW" factor with this cake. I'm pretty proud of this cake and I had a blast making it.

Happy Birthday Kierra!

Pistachio Cupcakes



I made these for the daughter of a friend last year. They were soooo good. Everyone seemed to like them quite well. I ended up making her an awesome Twilight themed cake but that's another story I haven't yet posted.

Ingredients:

1 (18.25 oz.) pkg yellow cake mix
2 (3.2 oz) pkgs instant pistachio pudding mix
1 cup water
3/4 cup vegetable oil
4 eggs

Directions:

In a mixing bowl, combine dry cake and pudding mixes, water, oil and eggs. Beat on low speed for 1 minute. Pour into a greased 9-inch or 10-inch fluted tube pan. Or in my case muffin tins lined with cupcake liners.

Bake at 350 degrees F for 60-70 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes before removing from pan to a wire rack to cool completely. Adjust the baking time for cupcakes. I can't recall how long I baked these as cupcakes as it was last year when I made them. I would use the baking time suggested for cupcakes on the cake mix box as a guideline.

I topped the cupcakes with a pistachio buttercream. I used a standard buttercream recipe replacing the vanilla, almond and butter flavorings with pistachio flavoring instead.

Happy Baking,
~Kat~