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My hus­band men­tioned that he’d seen a Paula Deen recipe for pink lemon­ade cake.  I thought that sounded really nice and would be a great Sum­mer­time dessert.  After look­ing at Paula’s recipe online and the com­ments by users who had found it “too dense” “too this” or “too that” I decided to run with her basic flavour idea but to tweak it and hope­fully turn out some­thing really nice.

This is what I did.  It’s really easy and very tasty.

I took a box of white cake mix and pre­pared it as directed on the box except that I don’t like to use oil in my cakes so I replaced the 1/3 cup of oil with an equiv­a­lent 1/3 cup of nat­ural, unsweet­ened apple sauce.  To the mix I then added three heaped table­spoons of the Coun­try Time Pink Lemon­ade drink mix and also added a dash of Mada­gas­car Vanilla and about a table­spoon of lemon zest.  I decided I wanted my cake to be more pink than the pale colour it was cur­rently so I added a dash of pink food colour­ing until it was pink enough for me.

Ingre­di­ents so far:

1 box of Moist White Cake Mix

3 egg whites (no yolks)

1/3 cup nat­ural, unsweet­ened apple sauce

1 & 1/4 cup of water

3 heaped table­spoons of Coun­try Time Pink Lemon­ade drink mix pow­der (not diluted)

1 tsp of Mada­gas­car Vanilla or Vanilla Essence

1 table­spoon of fresh lemon zest

Pink food colouring

 

(Bak­ing purists are prob­a­bly rolling their eyes at my sug­ges­tion of using a box mix and then the addi­tion of pink food colour­ing.  It worked for what we were doing here so I’m ok with it.  If you aren’t, there are plenty of from scratch white cake recipes out there to delight your pure lit­tle baker’s hearts.)

Even though I have a pas­sion for bak­ing we try not to keep too many good­ies in the house because we both could stand to lose some weight.  So we send our good­ies off to work with my hus­band and I’ve heard his cowork­ers think this is ok.  Since they are headed for the office I decided to make cup­cakes as they are far more man­age­able than need­ing to find a knife and plates for carv­ing up a larger sin­gle cake.

Next I cre­ated a tasty com­ple­men­tary frost­ing.  I pretty much always go for my basic cream cheese frost­ing and just change it up a lit­tle to suit what it is that I’m making.

Frost­ing:

Crust­ing cream cheese buttercream

5 heaped table­spoons of Coun­try Time  Pink Lemon­ade Drink Powder

After the cup­cakes came out of the oven and cooled I frosted them with a gen­er­ous swirl of but­ter­cream and some sugar sprin­kles just to make them shiny.  So that’s it folks.. really a quick and easy recipe and per­fect for sum­mer meal­times or snacks.  Enjoy!  And remem­ber if you have any ques­tions don’t hes­i­tate to email me.  I try to answer all emails even if they may take a cou­ple of days to get you your response.

~ Colleen

 

 

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Some peo­ple col­lect stamps, oth­ers like me, col­lect recipe books.  But what’s the good of own­ing all these glo­ri­ous tomes if I don’t actu­ally pull them off the shelf and try out some of the recipes.  I’ve made lemon bars before but this time I’m going to be using Ina Garten’s recipe.  Noth­ing says sum­mer more than lemon flavoured desserts.

Ina Garten’s Lemon Bars
Ingre­di­ents Crust: 1/2 pound unsalted but­ter, at room tem­per­a­ture 1/2 cup gran­u­lated sugar 2 cups flour 1/8 tea­spoon kosher salt Fill­ing: 6 extra-large eggs at room tem­per­a­ture 3 cups gran­u­lated sugar 2 table­spoons grated lemon zest (4 to 6 lemons) 1 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice 1 cup flour Con­fec­tion­ers’ sugar, for dusting	Ina Garten’s Lemon Bars
Method Pre­heat the oven to 350 degrees F. To make the crust, cream the but­ter and sugar until light in the bowl of an elec­tric mixer fit­ted with the pad­dle attach­ment. Com­bine the flour and salt.  With the mixer on low, add to the but­ter until just mixed.   Dump the dough onto a well-floured board and gather into a ball. Flat­ten the dough with floured hands and press it into a 9 by 13 by 2-inch bak­ing sheet, build­ing up a 1/2-inch edge on all sides. Chill. Bake the crust for 15 to 20 min­utes, until very lightly browned. Let cool on a wire rack. Leave the oven on. For the fill­ing.  Whisk together the eggs, sugar, lemon zest, lemon juice, and flour. Pour over the crust and bake for 30 to 35 min­utes, until the fill­ing is set. Let cool to room temperature. Cut into desired sized bars or tri­an­gles and dust with con­fec­tion­ers’ sugar.

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Ok, so I like this recipe. My daugh­ter thought they got a bit “rub­bery” after being refrig­er­ated overnight but when you are try­ing them at a 2am fridge raid, who knows what they taste like? I found that if I microwaved a lemon bar for around 20 sec­onds, they were returned to their “warm out of the oven” state and were still very tasty and enjoyable.