Cake Doctor

A month or two ago I made this impulse purchase at Sam's: 

The Cake Doctor happened to catch my eye and I got excited!  Each recipe uses a standard cake box mix as the foundation but calls for additional ingredients and different proportions of eggs, oil, and liquid.  I can make buttercream and cream cheese frostings in my sleep, but I wanted to enhance the overall taste of my cakes.

The first recipe I made was the chocolate buttermilk cake.  I made my favorite cream cheese frosting to go along with it.  The cake was for my oldest sister's birthday party.  I planned on dusting cocoa powder over a Happy Birthday stencil.  When I pulled the stencil off all of the frosting came with it.  After re-icing the cake, I tried again.  I didn't hold the stencil close enough to the cake and you couldn't read the writing.  I got pretty irritated and just dusted the whole top with cocoa and garnished the sides with fresh strawberries.  Oh well...

The following day was my sister's birthday lunch.  (Yes, we like celebrating birthdays that much.)  I made a classic yellow cake following a Cake Doctor recipe. I frosted and decorated with chocolate buttercream.  It was really easy and especially tasty!

That same night I tried a new recipe for strawberry cupcakes.  We had a 5th grade family potluck on our last workday and my teammates requested something with fresh strawberries.  The Cake Doctor recipe called for white cake mix, strawberry gelatin, minced strawberries, vanilla extract, eggs, oil, and milk.  The icing was a cream cheese frosting with pureed strawberries.  The consistency was very runny so I had to refrigerate it before piping it onto the cupcakes.  They were amazingly moist and tasted like a strawberry milkshake. 

The next stop on the cake baking frenzy is a pineapple upside down cake for Father's Day.