Sugared Cranberries and Box Cake

Sometimes a box cake may be your only option, and you want to "dress it up" a little. There have been a few ways I have altered a box cake to make a different kind of cake than was originally intended. If you love berries, there is a multitude of ways you can change a box cake into a yummy blueberry or this time, a cranberry, cake!

With a box cake, you don't want to change the recipe so drastically that it wont bake properly, so this idea is not very far-fetched or impossible.

For the cranberry cake, I used a simple vanilla box cake and mixed as instructed on the box. I also took 1 cup of fresh cranberries and cut them in half. Afterwards, I put them in a glass bowl with 1/4 cup of water.

I microwaved the cranberries in the water for about 20-30 seconds to soften them. Once softened, I added them to the cake batter and folded them in with a spatula. These little bits of cranberry baked right into the cake.

For frosting, use whatever you like!  This time I tried a sweet  splash of whipping cream and tablespoon of sugar and cream cheese. Mix until you get the consistency you like for a cake frosting. For the sugared cranberries, I put 1-2 cups on cranberries in a bowl and stirred in a few tablespoons of granulated sugar. The berries were already damp in the bag, so the sugar stuck well, but if you need to add a few drops of water to your berries, feel free to.

Lay your berries out on a pan for an hour if you would like the sugar to harden and your berries to look crusted with sugar. These turn into sweet little treats...almost like cranberry candy!

As a last step, I sifted some powdered sugar over the whole thing, but that was more for looks than taste ;)