let them eat boxed mix.

One of my nieces and both of my nephews are extremely disinterested in most junk food. It's like, "Mom, do I have to eat my brownie?" Anyway, I offered to make my nephew his birthday cake for our family party, and had hoped to change his mind; show him how amazing a really good cake can be. I have yet to find a signature cake of my own, so I spent most of an hour (ok, maybe longer) searching in vain for an amazing cake recipe. I found several that would certainly be appealing to an adult, but wasn't sure how far I could delve into nut territory, for example, with a 10 year old. He also wanted a chocolate cake with vanilla frosting, so any amazing chocolate candy bar frosting was out. Sigh. I nearly went with a chocolate hazelnut cake, which looked divine, (honestly, who doesn't like nutella?) but figured if I spent $30 and as many hours making a cake for a birthday party, I was slightly nuts myself. I finally went with a layer cake that had 2 candy bars in it. After all, how can you go wrong with candy bars?
As I was shopping for a couple of the ingredients, I decided I had better throw a box mix in the cart, just in case. I also grabbed a container of frosting, in case my white cloud recipe turned out more stratonimbus than cumulus.
Anyway, this morning as I was making the cake, I realized that there were no eggs in the recipe. I was extremely skeptical, and thought myself very clever as I reserved a little batter to make a test "cupcake." I went to check on the cake, which by all counts should have been done, and realized that in a braindead moment I had turned the oven off 20 minutes prior when retrieving my test cupcake. Excellent. I had hoped my oven retained heat *exceedingly* well, but, alas, this turned out not to be the case, and my fallen cake looked pretty desperate. Oh well. Dunkin Hines to the rescue.