This cake embodies the heart of what I love to do – take a simple idea, then turn it into my own cake design. A Margarita is a delicious AND beautiful cocktail. So why not make it into a cake that both looks like and tastes like a Margarita?

I started with my favorite vanilla cake mix – King Arthur Flour Golden Vanilla Cake. It’s available online – I find it to be the best vanilla cake mix for both flavor and moistness. What I have found, is that you can often make substitutions to the liquid ingredients in a cake recipe without altering the texture. For example, for this cake, I followed the box instructions for the butter, eggs, and oil additions. But it also called for 1 cup of milk. This is where I made a change by adding 1/2 c of milk, and 1/2 c of a Margarita liquid mix. This allowed the flavor of a Margarita to infuse the cake, without CHANGING the amount of liquid the recipe called for.

This cake is made with 3 – 8″ layers. I baked them according to the box instructions – without having to make any changes to the temperature or time.

I wanted to add a little more of the Margarita flavors into the cake during assembly. I mixed about 1/4 c of the Margarita mix, and added about 1 T of Tequila into a small bowl. This was used to brush lightly over each cake layer. (You can leave out the Tequila, if you don’t want actual “booze” in your cake.)

I made a batch of my cream cheese buttercream with 1 T lemon extract, and used some key lime curd I had leftover from another project – you can buy lime curd in the grocery store. I layered these separately, but as I was doing it – I thought next time I may just mix the frosting and curd together for the cake filling. It’s all about experimentation!

I assembled the cake with the buttercream and lime curd between the layers. I crumb-coated the whole cake with white buttercream, then refrigerated the cake for several hours.

Then I got creative with colors – and added some green and yellow paste food coloring to the leftover frosting, and created a bit of an “ombre” effect on the sides of the cake.

Finally, I chose some coarse sugar to garnish the top and bottom edges of the cake. It gave the look of salt, without the taste of salt. A lime slice was secured onto the edge of the cake using a toothpick.