Yesterday was a friend's birthday, and of course, I felt the occasion should be marked with cake. He hinted around that his favorite cake was a 7up cake made by his grandmother. I grew up hearing about 7 up cakes, but I've never made one. I googled it, and the results were fairly consistent in that most of them had you make a basic lemon cake and add the 7up to the batter rather than milk or water. I was in a pretty big time crunch, so I thought I'd use a mix instead (I know, how horrible!). In hindsight, I think actually making the cake from scratch would have been just as time efficient as using mix.
Anywho, I had the problem of trying to figure out what sort of cake mix I wanted to use. I thought white cake wouldn't really help with the lemon-lime flavor I was going for. Yellow cake would have too much of a buttery taste. The recipes I read seemed like they'd make a yellow cake (since many called for 5 eggs), but they also called for a good amount of lemon extract. So I went with a lemon cake mix and decided to keep the balance between lemon and lime fairly close.
The players:
1 box Lemon cake mix
3 eggs
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 1/3 cup lemon-lime soda
2-3 tbs fresh lime juice
zest of two limes
zest of one lemon
Game plan:
Preheat oven to 350 (or 325 for dark/coated pans). Mix all ingredients together in a large mixing bowl for 1 1/2 mins on high. Pour into prepared pan. Bake 35 mins or until toothpick comes out clean. Allow to sit in pan about 7 mins, then flip out onto cooling rack and allow to cool until it no longer feels hot.
Icing:
lime juice, confectioners sugar
Start with about a cup and a half of sugar and add about two tablespoons of juice. Keep mixing in sugar and juice until it has a good icing consistency...meaning until it can run down the sides of the cake slowly, but get firm once it cools.
I decorated the cake with zest from a lemon and a couple of limes.
Enjoy!
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