Non-Actionable Puffery

For b2mem 2019, I came up with a recipe for Bilbo's seed cake. Three years later, I've revisited the concept in a different form:



Taking inspiration from fiona15351's suggestion of a lemon glaze, I made the whole cake lemon à la a lemon poppyseed cake. And while the 2019 seed cake was from scratch, this one uses boxed cake mix, with my favorite baking trick/"secret ingredient": instant pudding mix! Instant pudding mix is the secret to making a cake from a boxed mix that tastes like it's from scratch; it comes out fantastically moist.

Ingredients:
1 box yellow cake mix, about 1 lb (I used Betty Crocker)
1 package instant lemon pudding, about 3.5 oz
1 cup water
1/2 cup oil (I used safflower oil)
3 eggs
About 1 1/2 tbsp caraway seeds

Directions:
Mix all ingredients until smooth and pour into greased pan, ideally a bundt or tube pan. Bake at 350˚F/175˚C until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean; because of the pudding mix, this will probably take longer than you expect.

The lemon flavor comes entirely from the pudding; I've never used the pudding to flavor the cake like that before, and I was pleased with how it turned out! The cake is a little sweeter than I'd prefer – an inevitable consequence of using a prepackaged mix – but very moist and lemony, and the caraway seeds are a nice addition. A more successful experiment than the avocado bread, I think.

In the past two(ish) weeks, I've made eight pumpkin pies. This is intimately related to the fact that I have slightly less than a month before the start of exams. Hooray for stress baking! At least my roommates are reaping the benefits.

Baking – as well as crochet, which I've also been doing a decent amount of – is really good for my mental health. Law school is largely intangible: You spend your time studying, and what you have to show for it is...an interior sense that you understand an abstract concept better. Or you work on a paper, and then you've produced...some words on a computer screen. But you spend time baking, and at the end of it you have a pie! It's right there, and you made it!

I usually make my own crust when I bake pies, but I've been taking the lazy student route and using store-bought frozen crusts. The filling is just your standard pumpkin pie recipe:
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As I mentioned in the last post, I made port wine cake for our New Year's dinner! Here is a picture:



This is my mom's recipe and, unlike the other baking I have been doing recently, is not completely from scratch, as it uses cake mix. This is one of the easiest things in the world to bake, but it is always a big hit!

Here is the recipe:
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I hope you all have a lovely 2019!