Champagne Cake

I adapted this recipe from a rum cake recipe on Gimme Some Oven. I still had champagne leftover from those cupcakes and god forbid I just throw it away.
I honestly have not tasted it myself yet, but it has gotten good reviews from my officemates so far. It makes a relatively pretty cake, as the outside is sugar-dusted to begin with, but kinda boring-looking on it's own. (The pics on the original recipe look a lot shinier than mine, so maybe I should have done more with the glaze, or at least upped the butter content?) To improve the aesthetics, I drizzled a vanilla frosting very lightly over the top, and dumped a berry medley into its center before serving. Unfortunately, it was gone before I got a picture of that!

Ingredients:

Cake Ingredients
1 (18.25 oz.) package yellow cake mix

1 (3.4 oz.) package vanilla instant pudding mix

4 eggs

1/2 cup water

1/2 cup champagne (sweeter the better!)

1/2 cup vegetable oil
extra sugar for pan

Glaze Ingredients

1/2 cup butter

1/4 cup water

1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup champagne

Method:

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F (I did 315F). Liberally grease (either way cooking spray or butter) a bundt pan, and then pour sugar into it and swirl around until the entire inside of the pan is coated in sugar. (Discard any remaining sugar.)

In a large bowl, combine cake mix and pudding mix. Mix in the eggs, 1/2 cup water, oil and 1/2 cup champagne. Blend well. Pour batter into pan.

Bake in the preheated oven for 60 minutes [Mine only took 50 min, tops!!], or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean. Let sit for 10 minutes in the pan, then turn out onto serving plate. Spoon glaze over top and sides. Allow cake to absorb glaze and repeat until all glaze is used.

Glaze Instructions:

In a saucepan, combine butter, 1/4 cup water and 1 cup sugar. Bring to a boil over medium heat and continue to boil for 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and stir in 1/2 cup champagne.

Tip: At the suggestion of other readers of the original recipe, I removed the cake from the pan, poked holes all in the cake then poured a little glaze in the pan and then put the cake back in the pan and pour the glaze all over the cake in the pan. Let it sit awhile then shake the cake loose carefully and plate it -- better the next day after giving more time to soak up the glaze flavors!