Tuesday, 11/30/2010

We celebrated 2nd birthdays with our PEPS group tonight.  Barb, Tad, and Ronan hosted the party.  Barb made a fantastic beef stew and fixed up gnocchi to go with it.  Continuing with our cycle of potlucks, we also had snacks for the kids, a spinach and strawberry salad, and crusty bread.  I signed up to bring the dessert.  What fun to make the birthday cupcakes:)  I used a recipe my friend Taran passed to me several years ago for a spice cake made with cream sherry.  Usually made in a Bundt cake pan, it was different to go the cupcake route with the recipe.  Thankfully, it worked great!  Here's the recipe:

SPICE CAKE

Ingredients:
1 yellow cake mix
1 small vanilla instant pudding
2 tsp nutmeg
2 tsp cinnamon
3/4 cup canola oil
3/4 cup cream sherry
4 eggs

Directions:
1.  Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Butter and flour a Bundt pan. 
2.  Mix dry ingredients together in a large bowl.  Add oil, sherry, and eggs. 
3.  Bake for 25-35 minutes.  The cake is done with a knife inserted into the cake comes out clean.
4.  Loosen the cake from the pan with a spatula.  This helps it from sticking to the pan when you turn it over.  Place on a plate and let cool completely.
5.  It tastes great with a cream sherry/powdered sugar glaze on top, or just powdered sugar.  For the glaze, mix a small amount of cream sherry with a large amount of powdered sugar until it reaches a very gooey, non-translucent state.  Pour over top of cake and let harden.  Voila!

Note: This recipe made 6 large and 12 medium sized cupcakes that were all bulging at the top.  I baked them for 23 minutes.  Since the cakes were mainly for 2-year-olds, I didn't think the cream sherry glaze was appropriate.  I frosted the cupcakes with store bought cream cheese frosting instead. I added green sprinkles for the boys and purple sprinkles for Katie.