Pomegranates are packed with antioxidants, which means that there are a lot of potential health benefits packed into each fruit. Pomegranates are a bit difficult to eat, since each little seed - although tasty - doesn’t have a lot of juice or flesh surrounding it, so it takes quite a while to consume one. This is where pomegranate juice comes in, making it easy to enjoy the flavor of pomegranate without the work involved in eating a whole fruit. The juice can be used in many different types of dishes, and while I often see it reduced in a sauce, I used some to sweeten up a chocolate bundt cake.

This cake is moist, chocolaty and has a tender, but slightly dense, texture. It’s a great bundt cake because it’s easy to make and each slice is satisfying to eat. I used pomegranate juice as the primary liquid in this cake, where I might use milk, buttermilk or coffee in another chocolate cake. There is a lot of cocoa powder in here, so you can’t directly taste the pomegranate flavor in the cake. You can definitely tell the juice is there, however, because there is a lovely fruity sweetness to the cake that adds some complexity to the flavor. Not wanting to skimp on the chocolate, I incorporated some chocolate chips into this cake, too.

I used POM Wonderful pomegranate juice in this cake, because it is pure pomegranate juice and not simply flavored white grape juice. Definitely take the time to look for pure juice when you make this cake, both for that fruity flavor and for the antioxidants (don’t forget that there are also plenty in the cocoa powder in this cake!). It’s pretty easy to justify having a second piece when you can say you’re doing it for health reasons!
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A Sock-it-to-me-Cake is a type of coffee cake that has a pecan, cinnamon and brown sugar filling that is baked in a bundt or ring pan. It is moist and almost always made with a generous amount of sour cream. It is also almost always made with a yellow cake mix, preferably a Duncan Hines brand mix. With the cake mix, the recipe is very easy and fast to put together. As easy as it may be, I still like to have a from-scratch version of the recipe available to me, so I put one together that bakes a very similar Sock-it-to-Me cake without the mix.

Cake mix cakes are designed to be very tender and moist, and this cake is, too. I used cake flour, rather than all purpose, to give it an even lighter and more cake-mix-like texture than it might otherwise have. I also used a combination of butter and vegetable oil in the cake. The vegetable oil, along with a good portion of sour cream, gives it some extra moisture and helps to keep the cake tasting fresh even a few days after baking. The butter helps the tenderness of the cake, but more importantly, it lends a really nice flavor to everything. This cake has a good, light texture and a soft crumb. I baked it in a tube pan because it’s so easy to get a cake out of a pan with removable sides. That said, you could easily bake this in a bundt pan instead.

The filling for this coffee cake is not a streusel, which many coffee cakes have. Instead it is a mixture of cinnamon, toasted pecans and brown sugar. It is a bit dry on its own and may seem to be too strongly cinnamon flavored before you put it into the cake. Don’t worry too much about this because the cake is relatively plain and all of that cinnamon in the filling really balances out well with the rest of the cake when you’re eating it. Speaking of cinnamon, I also added some cinnamon to the glaze on top of this cake, which adds a little extra sugar and spice to each bite.

This cake is great in the morning with coffee and is equally good served with dessert. As coffee cakes go, it is very easy to throw together because you don’t need to fuss with streusel or any special fillings, just a simple and flavorful mix that comes together in a few seconds before going into the cake.

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When I saw Wilton’s Tasty Fill Heart Cake Set, I knew that I wanted to try making one of the lovely heart-centered cakes myself. A cake with a heart-shaped center is perfect Valentine’s Day. After I picked up the cake pan set, all I needed to do was decide what flavor cake I wanted to make. I decided to work backwards and, knowing that I wanted a pink heart at the center of the cake, I ended up opting for a very dark-colored chocolate cake for the cake itself.

The cake pans come in a pair and you get the heart center when the two cakes are stacked on top of each other. This cake recipe fits the pans perfectly, and it rose up just to the top of them, easily filling the cavities built-in to the pans which produce the heart shape. This is a recipe that I would ordinarily use to make two thick 8-inch cake layers. There is a whole cup of cocoa powder in the cake, so it has a really delicious chocolate flavor to it. It is very moist and tender, but is not too dense and is very easy to handle the cake (it isn’t too delicate or likely to crumble as you move the pieces around). There is coffee in the cake to emphasize some of the cocoa notes, but there is no coffee flavor to the finished cake - just a lot of chocolate.

While I knew from the start that I wanted a pink filling, the hardest part of making this cake was figuring out what that filling should be. Ice cream is a good option, but not great in the wintertime, and many of the suggestions that came with the pan included Cool Whip - which I didn’t want to use. I ended up making a very light raspberry mousse, held together with a little bit of plain gelatin to give it stability. It has a great raspberry flavor, a beautiful color (black raspberries will give you a more purple color, regular will be lighter pink; I used a mixture of both) and a very light, fluffy texture to it. I used a pasteurized egg white, beaten to soft peaks, to give this mousse a lot of volume. You can actually use meringue powder as a good substitution in this case if you can’t get pasteurized eggs, so I’ve made notes about the substitution below.

The finishing touch for this cake is the cream cheese frosting on top. The creamy frosting has a nice sweetness to it that goes well with the chocolate cake. It also blends nicely with the bright raspberry flavor of the mousse. You can use other berries for the filling - strawberries, blackberries, etc.  - and you can use either fresh berries or frozen, defrosted berries.

This cake should be stored in the fridge to keep the mousse filling firm. That said, the cake must be stored in an airtight container to prevent the cake from becoming dry in the fridge.

This cake didn’t disappoint me in any way. It was delicious, with a great cake, a great combination of flavors and a finished product that looked just like the cake does on the box! This is definitely a great treat for Valentine’s Day, and I like the pan enough that I’m going to have to look for other excuses to have a cake with a heart-shaped center around, too.

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I was recently watching a documentary on the history of the Coca-Cola company and it got me thinking about whether I could use Coke in baking. I’ve used sodas, like root beer, before in barbecue sauces, but would the flavor of the soda come through in a cake or other baked good? I didn’t have to wonder for long because it turns out that there are lots of recipes that use Coca-Cola right on the company’s website, including a recipe for a Cola Cake (pdf).

The cake uses Coke in both the cake and the glaze that covers it, and it was almost exactly what I had in mind for a recipe that used coke, since it used quite a bit of soda. It’s a chocolate sheet cake topped with a Coke-infused glaze and lots of crunchy pecans. Now, I said “almost exactly” because I made some changes to this recipe right off the bat. I reduced the amount of butter called for slightly, used less cocoa powder to make sure the Coke flavor came out and added a bit of salt to contrast the sugars in the cake. The result was really delicious, so I am confident in saying that Coke works out well as an addition to some baked goods!

I like that this cake is baked and served in the same dish because it’s easy and unfussy to do so. This is especially true because the glaze is poured on while the cake is hot, so you don’t need any frosting for it. The cake is very, very moist and very soft. It has a nice chocolate flavor to it and you can just get a hint of the spicy flavor of the Coke through it. This is helped along by a butter and Coca-Cola glaze that is poured over the cake just as it comes out of the oven. Pecans are used in the topping to add crunch to the cake, and they’re slightly candied by the butter-Coke mixture before they make it on to the cake. One great finishing touch is to make sure to use toasted, salted pecans for the topping. That extra salt really makes for the perfect contrast and just might make this cake as popular as the soda featured in it!

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Pudding cake will always be one of my favorite cool-weather desserts. As good as it is all year round, you can’t beat the warmth of a sticky, gooey pudding cake fresh from the oven on a winter evening. Chocolate pudding cakes are tough to beat, but I’m a big fan of citrus pudding cakes as well. Lemon, lime and orange all get top marks from me when citrus is in season. It can be a bit boring to make the same dessert over and over again (no matter how good it is), so I’ve been experimenting with making a few additions to my pudding cakes.

I decided to try a Cranberry Orange Pudding Cake because I like my Cranberry Orange Breadso much. I made my usual pudding cake recipe and added dried cranberries to it. The cranberries sank to the bottom, soaked up some of the sauce from the pudding cake and became plump and flavorful during baking. If you have orange-flavored cranberries, you’ll get an even more orangy result. Whole cranberries, if you’re curious, will work out ok in this recipe, but were a bit too tart with this homey, sweet dish. A blend of whole and dried may be the ticket if you want to up the tartness in the dessert.

The cake bakes into a light sponge layer and a thick pudding layer in the oven. You do need to put it into a shallow water bath to help the sauce portion of the cake form. Make very sure that the water in your water bath doesn’t come more than 1/2-inch up the sides of the dish with the cake in it. If you have too much water, the pudding part of the cake will not thicken and your dessert will be very runny. It’s better to have a little bit less of a very good, thick custard than to try to make it overly saucy and end up with pudding cake soup.

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One of the things that I look forward to in the winter is meyer lemon season. Meyer lemons are hybrid fruits, a cross between a mandarin orange and a lemon that has all the flavor of the lemon without the acidity. They’re really easy to work with and make for a nice change in recipes. In this Meyer Lemon Bundt Cake, for instance, there is a lot of lemon juice but the finished cake comes out with a smooth and somewhat mellow - as opposed to bright and tangy - lemon flavor.

Apart from the Meyer lemons themselves, this is a fairly standard bundt cake. It is moist, with a tight crumb and is especially good with a little bit of glaze on top. I included a good amount of lemon zest to emphasize the lemon flavor and opted not to include vanilla extract so that the citrus wouldn’t have any competition for the spotlight in this cake. The cake will keep, well-wrapped or stored in an airtight container, for a couple of days, so this is a nice cake to bake on a weekend and nibble at during the week.

Now, if you can’t get Meyer lemons, you can easily substitute regular lemon juice into this recipe and get great results. If fact, if you’re not too familiar with meyer lemons, you might want to try giving both versions a try (or simply compare the lemons side-by-side) to get a feel for the differences between the two.

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