Cherries, chocolate, and more cherries

For Mother's Day I decided to try and use up some of my stash of cake mixes. I have a cookbook called The Cake Mix Doctor, and I found a recipe in it for an ice cream cake, using a boxed cake mix and melted ice cream. It sounded intriguing, and since I had a quart of Jerry Garcia ice cream in the freezer I decided to give it a shot. The resulting cake was fluffy but rich, dense, moist, and absolutely irresistible! The only flaw was that it sort of caved in on the top while it was baking, but since I baked it in a bundt pan I inverted it onto a serving platter and the formerly caved in top now became the bottom, and the new top was golden and perfect, even more perfect once it was covered in chocolate and cherries. A ridiculously easy, delicious cake, which I highly recommend.

Chocolate Cherry Garcia Cake
(adapted from The Cake Mix Doctor)

For Cake

1 18.25 oz box yellow cake mix

2 cups melted ice cream (this is approximately 1 pint of unmelted ice cream, it gets much more dense as it melts and it loses air)

1 egg

For Glaze

Equal parts semisweet chocolate and heavy cream

(I used about 4 oz of chocolate chips and 4 tbsp heavy cream for this recipe. If you want the glaze to cover the entire cake you'll need to make a little more).

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a ten inch bundt pan. In a medium size mixing bowl stir together cake mix, melted ice cream, and one egg. The batter will be extremely thick. Pour and scrape the batter into the bundt pan, bake for approximately 30-35 minutes, or until top of cake is puffed and golden, and a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean.

Let the cake sit in the pan and cool for about 15 minutes, then carefully loosen the edges of the cake from the pan with a spatula and gently invert the cake onto a wire rack to cool.

While the cake is cooling, heat the heavy cream in a small saucepan over medium heat. Once the cream is slightly bubbly and hot through, remove it from heat and stir in the chocolate pieces until the glaze is dark brown and shiny. Let the glaze cool for a few minutes until it has slightly thickened, then pour it over the top of the cake and let it drizzle down the sides. Top the cake with fresh cherries right before serving, and enjoy!