Kahlua Cake, sent in by Jane, and My Messy Version of It

A friend in Jane's book group served a Kahlua cake and it was a hit, so she sent in the recipe. It's an enhanced yellow cake mix cake --- these types of cakes seem so popular ---a friend of ours makes her famous "green" cake and guests are disappointed if she doesn't bring it to pot luck events.

However, I don't have a cake mix on hand, nor do I have a car to go buy one since we are now sharing one, so I decided to try to create this cake, or a variation of it, using my pantry ingredients. (This is my definition of playing in the kitchen.) Worst case I could give it to the birds.

Here's the original recipe:

Kahlua Cake
A pass-along recipe from Jane's book group 2009

1 package yellow cake mix
1 package chocolate instant pudding mix
4 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
1/3 cup Kahlua
1/3 cup Vodka
½ cup sugar
¾ cup water
¼ cup Kahlua
½ cup confectioners’ sugar

Preheat the oven to 350.

Combine the cake mix, pudding mix, eggs and oil in a bowl and beat until smooth.
Add 1/3 cup Kahlua, vodka, sugar and water and mix well; batter will be thin.

Spoon into a greased and floured bundt pan. Bake for 50 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean. Set out to cool for just several minutes.

For the glaze, mix ¼ cup Kahlua and confectioners sugar until smooth. Spoon over warm cake. Let stand until cool.

Serves 16

Here's what I did:

Checked what I had on hand: Had everything but the chocolate pudding. Luckily, I had a box of butterscotch pudding instead. So, this cake is meant to be. Yeah!

The first step was to guess what's in a yellow cake mix. I assumed cake flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Sugar, for sure. No idea on the proportions. But 2 cups is a good place to start. So, I started noodling what I would do, while I softened some butter, which I want to use instead of oil. Decided to check out the cake flour box to see how they suggest to make cakes. Not much help since my pan is a bundt pan. The box is about the size of a cake box, so I looked to see how much flour was inside relative to a cake mix --- looks like my original 2 cups guess should be more like 3 cups, if my memory serves me well--- we'll see.

Then I went to the Internet. The only thing I learned there is to use only baking powder, skip the baking soda. Lots of recipes using cake mixes! Very creative ideas. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Dig out the bundt pan from the back of the closet and clean it. Grease it thoroughly, including all of the ridges and difficult spots.

Cream together butter and sugar, until light and fluffy.

Add vanilla extract, then add one egg at a time, fully incorporating each time.

Realized that my consistency wasn't right, so I doubled my sugar from 3/4 c. to 1.5 in total. Much better. In a separate bowl, I added 2 cups of cake flour, then filled the third cup with the box of butterscotch pudding mix and more cake flour. Guessed at 1 T. baking powder, and 1 t. salt.
Whisk them together. Since I didn't have chocolate pudding mix, I was going to add chocolate chips, but discovered we had a bag of butterscotch chips. Since this cake is for Tom and David, and they love butterscotch, I went the butterscotch route.

Combine with the flour mixture.

Measure 1/3 Kahlua, 1/3 Vodka, and the rest in buttermilk to make a total of 1 cup. (This turned out to be too little liquid.)

Mix into the wet ingredients, half of the dry ingredients, then all of the liquids, then the 2nd half of the dry ingredients.

My batter was too thick, so I added 1/3 cup more of buttermilk.

Pour into a prepared bundt pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 50 minutes.

Cool for 15 minutes.

Invert on a serving plate. Oops! Here's when I ran into a big problem. The cake wasn't coming out of the pan easily.
Guess what? Butterscotch chips sink to the bottom of the pan. Did you know that? I didn't. So, I had to salvage the cake and scrap out the chips to make a glaze.

I melted "the mess" in a small bowl in the microwave just until it began to soften -- watching so that it did not burn -- then I stirred in a tablespoon or two of light cream until it was the thickness of a sticky glaze.I tasted the gooey glaze on the part of the cake that fell off before I committed to drizzling it all over the cake. The cake is very good. Very moist and tender. I think it would have been better as a chocolate Kahlua cake. The butterscotch chips are cloying to me. I don't really like them, even in cookies. But, we'll see what Tom and David think.
Kahlua Butterscotch Cake with Butterscotch Drizzle
Barbara's variation of Jane's book club recipe, 2009
2 sticks of unsalted butter, room temperature
1.5 cups of white sugar
1/2 t. vanilla extract
4 eggs
2 cups cake flour plus part of a third to complete 3 cups, including
1 butterscotch pudding mix box
1 T. baking powder
1 t. salt
1 bag butterscotch chips
1/3 cup Kahlua
1/3 cup Vodka
1/3 cup buttermilk plus another 1/3 cup for a total of 2/3 cup
for the glaze 1 bag of butterscotch chips and 1 to 2 tablespoons light cream

Tom and David's evaluation: Said it made the house smell great ---they loved it -- they ate seconds! David took home two big pieces. They thought the whole thing was good, even the glaze. But none of us are sure about the alcohol doing anything special for the flavor. I still would have preferred Jane's original chocolate version.