Recipe: Moistestest Cake (from a box)

My brother, Trent, is famous for his Sandy Cake.  It starts from a boxed yellow cake mix but ends up as a thick, moist, cinnamon-sugary, crispy glazed cake that makes the crowd go wild.  Here is the recipe:

Sandy Cake
-1/2 cup sugar
-1 tsp. cinnamon (or a little more if you like)

-1 yellow cake mix
-1 large package instant vanilla pudding
-4 eggs
-1/2 cup oil
-1 8 oz. package cream cheese (at room temp will be easiest)
-1 cup hot water

Preheat oven to 350.  Mix cinnamon and sugar.  Grease and "flour" a bundt pan with the cinnamon-sugar mix.  Use only what you need of the mix to coat the pan, the rest will be used later.  Mix the eggs, oil, cream cheese, and water together.  Add the pudding and cake mix.  Pour half of the batter (it will be thick) into the bundt pan.  Add remaining cinnamon-sugar mix.  Swirl into cake with a knife.  Add remaining batter to cake.

Bake for approx. 55 minutes.  Do the toothpick test to check for doneness.

Glaze the cake with a simple powdered sugar glaze (powdered sugar, water, and vanilla).

So I use this basic pudding, cream cheese, etc. addition any time I want to really make a delicious cake.  You can make them into rounds, as a sheet, cupcakes, whatever you want.  The only thing to remember is to add a little bit of baking time to the box's indicated time.  We've done funfetti cakes this way, plain yellow cakes with chocolate cream cheese frosting, just experiment.

Last night I made a cookies and cream cake.  I used a devil's food cake mix, chocolate pudding, dusted the pan with a sugar/cocoa mix, and crumbled Oreo cookies in between the two batter layers.  I topped it with a cream cheese frosting to which I added a cup of food-processored Oreos.  It was really tasty.  I think I overbaked it a bit so it wasn't AS moist as it could have been, but it was still solid.  Here are the pictures:

Not bad, right?  I'm telling you, the extra ingredients make any boxed cake so delicious...worse for you, obviously, but scrumptious.

Bake away!