Superbowl "BOOM" Cake (Pistachio Cake with pourable frosting)

Well everyone around here is getting ready for the biggest football game of the year, the Superbowl!  You must know by now how much I adore coordinating theme colors into my food selections, so what better way to rev up your team spirit than with a tasty cake in your team colors? 

A Superbowl "boom" cake inspired by the Seahawks team colors

A few months back on pinterest I saw a recipe for a pistachio bundt cake that had a lovely lime green coloring to it.  I wasn't too sure if we would like a pistachio flavor, but tucked that lime green color into the back of my head in case I ever needed a green themed food.  When I realized our home team's highlight color was indeed the color lime, coupled with the fact that I was in charge of bringing a dessert to the party, a light bulb went off.  I could make a yummy lime green cake and top it with Seahawks colors.  Perfect.

After reading through the comment section of the original recipe for this cake, I modified it slightly.  Here is how I made it and what you will need: (full printable recipe found at the end of the post)

Ingredients:

1 box (Duncan Hines) white cake mix
1 3.2 oz box of pistachio pudding mix
3 eggs
1 cup of water
1/4 cup of oil
2 teaspoons almond extract
7 drops of green food coloring

In a bowl, mix together the white cake mix and the pistachio pudding mix.  You want to use Duncan Hines cake mix specifically, because they do not already add pudding into their mix.

Then add in 3 eggs, 1 cup of water, 1/4 cup of oil, 2 teaspoons almond extract and the green food coloring.  

Beat with an electric mixer for 2 minutes until blended together

Meanwhile, grease and flour a bundt cake pan very well.

Pour the cake batter into the pan, make sure it goes in evenly.

With this lovely green color, I'm thinking this cake will work great for St. Patrick's day or for a nice spring-hued cake

Bake in the oven at 350º for 45-50 minutes.  When it comes out, it will look like this:

The one, main trick to ANY bundt cake, is to set a timer for 10 minutes after the cake comes out of the oven.  You will want to turn this cake out on a serving plate while it is still quite warm, or it won't come out of the pan very well.  So with oven mitts and a steady hand, flip this cake out onto a large plate.

Let the cake completely cool on the plate.  Now comes the fun part.  I had seen (again, thank you pinterest), a technique using regular store bought frosting in the microwave.  Heating it up slightly made it a pourable, drizzle-able glaze of sorts.  I had never tried anything thing like this, but for the 3-color vision in my head, I wanted to see if it would work.  First, I split the tub of frosting into three sections.

Two small, microwave safe bowls, and the left over I was going to leave white in the tub.  I nuked the tub for 10 seconds, then took it out to stir.  It was a little thick, so I added 1 teaspoon of milk and microwaved it for 10 more seconds. 

Now the consistency was nice and loose, and I felt it would be a good drizzling thickness.  Holding the tub right over the cake, I dipped in a large spoon, held it up and starting running my hand back and forth over the ring.

 
It is okay if it drips down onto the plate, or inside the ring.  Next, I dyed one of the bowls with blue food coloring and stirred it up.  Using the same technique I did with the white, which was 10 seconds in microwave, stir, add 1 tsp of milk, 10 more seconds, then it was ready to drizzle.

I had so much fun with this I forgot to show the blue layer.  Next came the green layer.  To get a more lime green color, I used the regular green dye at first, but then added a couple drops of the neon green food coloring to give it that oomph it needed to be truly lime green.

Use the same microwave, melting, milk, stirring process as the other two colors and drizzle away.  Here is an aerial view of the cake.  After the three main thick colors, I went back over with the white and did a very thin top layer to bring out all three colors better.

This thing looks like an explosion of color, which is why I decided to call it a "BOOM" cake.

You bring this to a Superbowl party and I promise any die hard fan will go NUTS over this. My favorite part of this cake is the surprise lime green center that no one will be expecting.

Yummy yummy... I should probably serve this with a side of Skittles...

It's hard not to dive right in.  Here's a close up of the ring after a slice has been cut.  The pistachio flavor, by the way, was very mild.  I could almost not taste a big difference in flavor, but it slightly reminded me of Spumoni ice cream you would get after dinner at the Spaghetti Factory.  If you do not have pistachio flavor, you could totally use vanilla pudding and then you would also be free to dye the center any team color you wanted.

The great thing about this idea is, you can pick any colors you want.  I was so surprised that the melting the frosting, turned it into a pourable glaze and really worked pretty awesome.  Especially on a bundt cake where normally your only options are a dusting of powdered sugar.  But I imagine you could do a strawberry cake with different shades of red white and pink for Valentine's day.  You could do orange and purple and black over a chocolate cake for Halloween.  You could do pastel colors for a cute Easter cake.  You could make it any sports team colors.  I fell in LOVE with this idea!  I really did.  Let me know if you make a cake like this and what color theme you used.  For link to full printable recipe, click here.  Enjoy!!