Pineapple Upside Down Cake Balls

These were the perfect treat for our New Year's Eve get together! Keeping with the hors d'oeuvres and appetizer theme, these were placed along side the meatballs, cheese and crackers and so on for people to just pick up and pop in their mouth as they were walking by. I had the hardest time coming up with a individual dessert recipe until I stumbled upon these tasty little bites. I then put my own little spin on it and created pineapple upside down cake balls! They were so yummy, almost better than regular pineapple upside down cake! These do take some time, but it is definitely worth it!

Recipe:
1 box pineapple supreme cake mix
1 can of sprite (to use in place of eggs, oil and water)
1/2 cup of butter
1/2 cup of packed brown sugar
1 can pineapple chunks
1 jar maraschino cherries
toothpicks

Melt the butter and brown sugar together and spread on the bottom of a 9x13 pan. Mix cake batter and sprite together and pour on top of butter/brown sugar mixture. Bake cake according to time on box. Let it cool for a few hours or overnight if possible. When cooled, crumble cake into bowl. Mix in pineapple juice from can until cake is moist. Roll cake mixture into 1-2 inch balls and place on wax paper. Cut pineapple chunks and maraschino cherries into smaller pieces. Place one piece of pineapple and one piece of cherry on top of cake ball and secure with a toothpick. This makes between 36-48 cake balls depending on size of ball.

These can be done in SO many cake combos! This will be my new go to dessert treat for parties or BBQs.

Rainbow Cake

So, at first glance this cake really doesn't look too appetizing, right? To be honest it looks like a hamburger. The yellow frosting looks like mustard, the red cake looks like ketchup, and the suppose to be purple cake looks more like a char broiled burger. But, cut this bad boy open and...




...how awesome is that! I got this idea from a friend of mine who made one. She got the original idea from another blog, which can be found here. I used this ladies basic concept of the cake, which might I add she does a great job of explaining the whole process - way better than me! I then used my own frosting and the end result was soooo yummy!!

Recipe:
Cake:
2 boxes of white cake mix (no eggs, oil or water though)
2 cans of sprite (this takes the place of the eggs, oil and water)
1 box gel food coloring

Mix the cake mix with the sprite (or any clear soda I suppose) until blended. Separate into 6 different bowls, about a cup and a half for each bowl. Use the gel food coloring to color each bowl a color of the rainbow (1 red, 1 orange, 1 yellow, 1 green, 1 blue and 1 purple). Grease 2 round cake pans. Starting with red, put half the batter in the middle of the cake pan and repeat with each color working your way down the rainbow color line. Don't mix the colors, just layer them one on top of the other and they will spread themselves out. Do this for each pan. **I did one pan starting with red and the other going backwards starting with purple, do whichever you would like** Bake the cakes at the recommended times on the box.

Frosting (Lemon cream cheese):
1/4 cup butter
4 oz cream cheese
3 Tbsp lemon juice
3 1/4 cup powdered sugar
food coloring

Beat the butter and cream cheese together. Then add lemon juice. Beat in powdered sugar in 1 cup at a time. Add more sugar to get it to the spreading consistency that you like. You can add whichever color food coloring you would like at this point, or leave it white. Obviously, for this cake I chose to use yellow food coloring.




This cake was such a big hit at our friends birthday! Next time, I'll do both the layers with red on the bottom so it doesn't look so unappetizing before its cut into. And then I'll choose a different icing color to nix the whole ketchup/mustard combo. You're probably thinking just put some icing on the side to cover it up. Yes, that is the logical idea but I'm just personally not the biggest fan of icing on the sides of cakes. Either way, its a super fun cake with lots of possibilities that'll get lots of attention :)