This photo displays a doughnut-shaped vanilla Bundt cake with white frosting. The cake is placed on a silver-colored cake stand on a marble countertop.

Is It Cake, Or…?

This photo displays a doughnut-shaped vanilla Bundt cake with white frosting. The cake is placed on a silver-colored cake stand on a marble countertop.

Is it cake or my dream vacation home? I could live in the Land of Vanilla, where gentle waves of frosting lap yellow cake shores. Also, this cake sort of kind of looks like a giant doughnut, and I don’t hate that idea, either.

Here’s the thing: I didn’t really make it myself. It just sort of emerged from a box mix, which is the 1950s version of AI for frustrated and drunk housewives. Add a plug-in vacuum cleaner, and the Jetsons will think you’re a witch!

So, what was an instant cake mix doing in my pantry? When Nate and I went to Hawaii last month, I wondered what Alex—our perfectly capable college-age son—would do all day without a little side project, so I bought him a cake mix to keep him busy, which I realize now, would not have kept him busy at all. In fact, he had a to-do list of his own, so he didn’t even have time for a side project. (Mom Joke Alert: Why are physics majors never bored? They’re busy doing all matter of things.)

During Alex’s spring break, we re-visited the cake mix project thinking, “This will take us a few fun hours,” but we were done mixing, pouring, and Bundt-cake-positioning the oven rack in less than ten minutes—if that.

Here’s the worst part: I didn’t even make the icing. It came from a can. And I didn’t alter the cake ingredients/directions in any way. Oh, the shame! The sweet, sweet, delicious shame.

Also, it slid perfectly out of the Bundt cake pan—no sticking, no pounding, no threatening to leave it on the front porch for savage delivery drivers to demolish. It simply slid right out, and the icing stuck to the top and sides of the cake, just like frosting is supposed to do.

So, yeah. If no one had taken this box out of the pantry, I would wager five robots that the cake mix would bake and frost itself just before its expiration date.

In any case, serve this delicious treat with:

–An afternoon binge-watching The Jetsons

–Margarita mix

–Alex’s physics homework

–A trip to Vanilla Land

–Two buckets of doughnuts

–Five cases of extra frosting (to use as a dipping sauce)

Your Turn: What’s the easiest thing you’ve ever made? (Please don’t say “mess” because that answer is already taken—by me. 🙂 )

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Published by ckennedy

Author of the DIY blog: Fixin' Leaks and Leeks. Paper/Rock Writing Consultation, Sole Proprietor.

14 thoughts on “Is It Cake, Or…?”

  1. When I was about 13, I was starting to get interested in baking. We lived in Germany, and my Mom wanted to give me the opportunity to make money with my own “business”. Since this isn’t allowed in Germany, but she was a career civil servant working for the Army and asked if she could bring her son’s concoctions to the office to sell them. Permission was granted and the business got off to a roaring start. Everybody there wanted homemade cake for a Quarter. I was using Betty Crocker’s Cookbook, which did not use cake mixes, but from scratch recipes – and the easiest recipe ever was the Orange Sponge Cake, which I could make in 10 minutes flat. It yielded 8 generous pieces tucked into small Glad bags. Within 4 weeks, I considered myself the richest kid on my block. After about 8 weeks a Sergeant First Class, who had a fridge in his office and who would buy pastries from the store on post and who marked them up for his “effort” told my Mom to stop selling my cakes or she would be in trouble. So my career ended too quickly.

    He, though, suffered a similar fate. The Inspector General of the Army came to his office on a surprise visit, saw the fridge and found the bottles of cheap Champagne he was hawking for office parties. He was told to get rid of everything in 10 minutes or he would lose his stripes.

    For me that was slightly delayed karma, and I never forgot it. The year was 1970.

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  4. Great post; very funny! 😊 The easiest I ever made was similar to your cake. I was around 11 and “making” a dinner for my parents’ anniversary. I served a roast that came out of a box, too! A roast in a box? Yikes. But to go with it I also made béarnaise sauce from scratch (I was at the start of learning classical French cooking which I continued for the next several years). The more I got into cooking though, the more obvious it became to me that I would never serve something like that ever again!

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