Last Minute Valentine Cake on the Fly

Photo: Bradley P. Johnson

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Got a last minute Valentine Date? Don’t have time to plan and need to pull a heart shaped miracle out of thin air? Relax! I’ve got you covered. With these directions and a dirt cheap ingredients list, you can serve a Valentine cake on the fly . . . without a specialty pan!

What you need:

• Your favorite flavor of cake mix and the box-listed ingredients to make it.
• A yummy flavor of frosting to go with it.
• The decorating sprinkles of your choice. (optional)
• A square cake pan.
• A round cake pan.
• A serving dish. (Don’t have one? Cut a square of cardboard and cover it in foil.) 

What you do:

• Bake up the cake mix in the round and square pans.
• Pop out the square cake and place it on the serving dish with a corner pointed to you, so that from your perspective, it looks like a diamond.
• Then, pop out the round cake, cut it in half and place one half on each of the top two sides of the “diamond” shaped square cake with the flat sides matching up.
• Voila! A heart.
• Stick the pieces together with a bit of the frosting you selected, and then slather the rest over the whole cake. 
• Sprinkle with sanding sugar, chocolate jimmies, chopped nuts, coconut, etc. If you are really pinching pennies however, this still looks nice  plain frosting and will get you major brownie points for even trying.
• Still having trouble picturing how it's done? Here's an awesome link from instructables.com that spells it out with pictures. Easy breezy.

Wanna go the extra mile? Snag a bottle of bubbly or a simple table wine,  whip a quick and classy pasta dinner with a side or two, light a candle and put on some smooth jazz. This is definitely an activity even the most kitchen challenged bachelors can pull off at the last minute. Hmmm . . . maybe I should have called this piece “How to Get Lucky”.

Need some other Valentine Ideas?

Here are a few resources from elsewhere around Wise Bread:

• Valentine Ideas for Singles, a post I did a while back.  
• Will Chen’s list of free Valentine Ideas.
• Here are more affordable romance suggestions from Xin Lu.

And for more ideas on how to pull off fun food feats with fewer gadgets, don’t miss Thursday Bram’s recent post on the subject.

Happy Valentine’s Day Wise Bread readers!