I woke up a few days ago and thought: Bundt Cake! Then I wondered why I thought Bundt cake in the first place, but quickly got over it once I realized that a class activity was bringing with it the opportunity to bake something and that’s always a good thing.

So, with this in mind, I ventured down to the Broadway Panhandler located along 8th Street to buy the necessary equipment. A Bundt cake pan is really something anyone with an oven should own and I discovered this store has a great variety of cooking tools (at reasonable prices, since I’m a struggling student of course.) It bakes more or less like a regular pan, except that anything you make in it has a fun shape and automatically looks a little fancier. They come in a variety of different shapes,like crowns and castles, but I use the classic dome design you’ll see in the pictures.

Instead of going the more traditional route and making a chocolate or vanilla cake, I tweaked a simple recipe and turned into a lemon blueberry cake. Sometimes chocolate can be a little too heavy and lemon flavored cakes are pretty popular, at least with the people I’ve fed in the past.

After making sure you get a pan to work with (and the one I got was less than $25.00 and came with two, one for six cups of batter and the other for twelve) it’s time to focus on ingredients. This recipe isn’t from scratch, so it’s a quick and easy treat that you can adjust to your preference.

You’ll need:

A twelve cup Bundt cake pan

Flour for dusting

A (16 oz.) box of yellow cake mix

A box of lemon pudding mix (3 oz.)

½ cup white sugar

¾ cup water

½ cup vegetable oil

4 eggs, beaten

¾ cup sour cream

1 cup blueberries—washed carefully

One lemon

Confectioners’ sugar for dusting

It’s Baking Time (yes, that was a Power Rangers reference):

• Turn on the oven to 330 degrees F.

In a large bowl, pour the cake mix, pudding mix and sugar together. After they are mixed, take a spoon and make a well in the dry ingredients (in other words, make a hole in the middle.)

In this little space, pour the water and oil. In a separate smaller bowl, crack each egg one at a time to make sure you don’t have a bad egg, and whip them up, adding each one into the well. Next, add the sour cream. With a whisk or fork, mix all the wet ingredients together in the well, slowly incorporating the dry into the wet.

• Once everything is mixed and looking smooth, add in the berries and fold them into the mix carefully (you can do this with a spoon or baking spatula.)You can then zest the lemon and add a little to the mix for an extra kick of citrus. (I’d say about half a tablespoon, but you can do it to your preference.)

Pour the mix into the pan and shake it gently to get rid of air bubbles.
Place pan into the oven and bake for 50-70 minutes. REMEMBER: Every oven works differently, so after about 45 minutes, check the cake bi jiggling it slightly. If it moves too much, it’s not done. Once it looks firmer, insert a toothpick into it and see if it comes out clean. If it does, it’s done! If not, place back into the oven for a few more minutes.

Once the cake is done, take out of the oven and allow it to cool COMPLETELY!
I know you’ll want to flip it soon, but if you do, the sides will get stuck to the pan and it will be a disaster. Trust me. Once the cake is cooled, place a large plate over the top of the pan. Holding the edges of the pan and plate carefully, flip it over so the cake is in the plate.

If you waited correctly, it should just need a few taps and out it comes!

Take a little confectioners sugar and lightly dust over the top.

Voila! Enjoy!!

Here’s the finished product 🙂

(This cake is relatively error proof. I took pictures during the process so you can see what each step more or less looks like.)

Feel free to change the lemon pudding for vanilla or chocolate and change the berries for chocolate chips 🙂 And if you’re feeling extra chocoholic, add frosting instead of sugar on the top! The point is to have fun with this recipe and adjust it to your flavor preferences.