Gelatin (Jell-O) Diet Soda-Pop Cake

1 store bought cake mix
1 twelve ounce can of diet soda
1 package of sugar-free gelatin (like Jell-O)
fat free whipped topping - two cups
vanilla extract (if desired)

Choose your cake mix, diet soda and gelatin that will coordinate well.

Some people use strawberry cake mix and diet lemon/lime soda, others have mentioned using white or yellow cakes and trying ginger ale. I used white cake with lemon/lime soda and lemon gelatin. The possibilities are really endless. I hear chocolate cake and Diet Coke work well, and black cherry Jell-O would coordinate with this.

One of the best ideas would be to look at the caloric information on the cake box and find the one that has the fewest calories in its unbaked form, since those calories are what you will have when you're done!

Then, you skip everything that the cake calls for and use only the diet soda to make the cake. I bought the pudding-in-the-mix kind of cake, and it turned out rather heavy instead of light and fluffy; it was flatter than a normal looking cake, so I would recommend not using the pudding-in-the-mix kind if you're trying for a lighter, fluffier cake. Mine was really delicious regardless, but it didn't have that fluffy appearance.

You still bake the cake according to box directions as far as temperature and time, but I found that mine took a little bit longer than the box called for, so I checked it often.

You do this: put the cake mix into a bowl, pour 10 - 12 ounces of soda in (start with ten and if it doesn't look like it is moist enough to have all of the batter mixed well then you can add the other one or two ounces as needed). Mix it thoroughly until there aren't dry blobs left in the mix, and then pour it into a cake pan that has been sprayed with non-stick cooking spray.

Bake as directed, turning the cake inside the oven a few times so that it cooks evenly. When the cake VERY near done, you can take it out of the oven and add the Jell-O and then put the whole thing back in for another five minutes

I use the Jell-O like this: I boil one cup of water, just before the cake is ready to come out of the oven. I pour the dry, SUGAR FREE Jello (or any brand of sugar free gelatin) into a little bowl and then pour the boiling water over the top, stirring for about 2 mintues to be sure it's all dissolved. I take the cake out and poke a little hole in the top of what will become each peice of cake after it's sliced. I use a chopstick for this purpose because it's about the right sized hole. Then I take a tablespoon and dip it into my hot liquid gelatin mixture, scoop out a spoonful, and then pour one spoonful into each hole. Then I kind of sprinkle the top with a little bit more if I feel like it, so that lots of the cake has some of the geletin.

You will have a little bit of leftover geletin - you can just pop that into the fridge as is, without adding extra water to it, and it will become a tiny Jell-O Jiggler for later.

The gelatin will kind of spread through the cake since the cake is spongy.

After baking it for a few minutes longer, you can take out the cake and let it cool completely before attempting to remove it from the pan. It will be fragile because it will be very moist from the gelatin, so you have to be careful if you want to remove it before frosting it.

After this point, you can frost it however you want, but I prefer to use fat free whipped topping, like Cool Whip. I mix in about a teaspoon of flavoring (like vanilla extract, etc.) before spreading the stuff all over the top of the cake - different kinds of flavorings work for different cakes, and I add a couple of drops of food coloring if I want to make it prettier. Red works for berry flavors, yellow for vanilla, banana, or lemon, orange for orange, green for lime, etc. You can mix it well, or just to a lazy job mixing so that you have swirls of color in the topping.

If you're interested, to add up your total calories you can estimate how much of the fat free whipped topping your peice of cake has on top of it; about two and a half tablespoons if you used two cups of topping total on the cake. Then you figure in a few measely calories for that geletin, which has anywhere from 5 to 10 calories per serving, depending on which brand you bought.

Vanilla has a few calories per teaspoon. Basically, I just think you should add about three calories to whatever the cake + topping come out as, and call it even.

Number of Servings: 12

Recipe submitted by SparkPeople user BECADCOX.