The Caramel Cake

For my parents' 40th anniversary party (see above), I decided to finally take pity on my father's recent inability to eat chocolate anytime after 4pm and indulge his love for caramel/butterscotch/all things made of gooey, delicious sugar. I found this recipe when doing a Google image search. Funny story about that: We had a snow day on Monday, so I decided to make the cakes and throw them in the freezer until Friday. Everything went according to plan. Come Friday, I go to print out the recipe for the filling and low and behold- the entire page of the website containing images and recipe for the cake, is gone. Completely gone. Panic ensued briefly. I then remembered that I am a librarian and did an internet search for "caramel cake" assuming I could find a similar recipe and just fudge the rest. Turns out the actual cake is from a Paula Dean recipe (hmmm, maybe this is why it mysteriously disappeared off some random woman's website). It's the same recipe as the coconut cake, except you use this amazingly indulgent caramel filling and frosting instead of the coconut filling. The cakes themselves come out so well, it is definitely my go-to cake recipe when I'm feeling more adventurous than a box.

The whole thing was a good learning experience. It taught me that maybe, I don't know, printing out the recipe before the day you want to use it might be a good idea. It also lead three 7th graders to first ask me why, if I was trying to make something good, I didn't just buy the cake and then to find the cookbook section of the library (600's) and bring me a "Desserts of the World" book allowing that "it has cake recipes in it."

Anyway, it was really good and pretty easy. I HIGHLY recommend Paula Dean's cake recipes- even with all the butter :-)