Welcome to Easter Week everyone! This week I was very excited about my 7th Annual Lamb Cake Reader’s Submissions and Giveaway, so I decided to make a lamb cake. Just to get into the spirit. 

And thank you to Alex and my mom, who contributed the excellent decorating skills!

AuthorRetroRuth

From Personal Recipe Collection

[cooked-sharing]

Now, I have a lot of good from scratch lamb cake recipe on this blog, but I have been getting a lot of requests to do a lamb cake from a mix. Normally, unless you can get your hands on a pound cake mix, that doesn’t work out too well. Standard boxed mixes are too soft for molded cakes and they tend to crack and crumble, especially if you are planning on making and frosting your cake the day before. But, I found this recipe handwritten on the back of a magazine clipping from the 1960’s recently, and I thought there was a chance this might make a standard cake mix stable enough to use in a vintage lamb cake pan. This was a bit of a risky plan, since the cake mixes we use today are different than the vintage ones, but I have never let that stop me before. I needed to do this for science. The science of lamb cakes.

Alex requested a pink lamb, so I decided to test this on a Pillsbury Moist Supreme Strawberry Cake Mix. The original recipe calls for a butter flavored cake mix, but my local grocery store did not carry those. Plus, they aren’t pink.

I filled up the lamb almost all the way to the top with batter. I wasn’t sure how dense the cake was going to be, so I decided to fill it up as much as possible. I was fully expecting batter to leak out and go everywhere and then have to start over.

Side note: I also got 8 additional cupcakes out of this cake mix.

Lamb cake all tied up! If you need step-by-step instructions on using your lamb pan, you can check out my tutorial here.

And it worked! The lamb baked well and depanned well. The batter didn’t overflow and the cake wasn’t raw in the middle.

Here is a cross-section so you can see the texture. It was more dense than the regular cake mix texture, much closer to a pound cake, but not nearly as dense as a pound cake. I ended up frosting it with a simple homemade cream cheese frosting made from 8 oz of cream cheese, 1/2 cup of unsalted butter, creamed together. Then I added six cups of sifted powdered sugar and a tablespoon of milk (you might not use all of it), and a teaspoon  of vanilla. Beat on high until all the powdered sugar has been incorporated completely.

The Verdict: It Worked!

Even though I added sugar to it, the cake actually wasn’t overly very sweet. It was a little crumbly, but was also dense and moist. It might have been even more moist if I would have decreased the baking time of the cake, which I think was just slightly too long. But the cake tasted really good with the cream cheese frosting, and the extra flavoring helped out a lot in masking the cake mix flavor. Overall, I say it was a big win, so if you have been wanting to use a cake mix in your vintage lamb pan now you can give it a shot!

REMEMBER! Send me your finished lamb/bunny/chicken cake pictures! They will be shared on the blog in a gallery and then some  lamb cake contributors will be chosen at random to receive some vintage cookbooks! Message them to me on our Facebook page or email them to me at ruth@midcenturymenu.com . Deadline is April 9, 2018 at midnight Eastern time. Also, feel free to email me questions or ask them in the comments below. Good luck with your lambs!