And I'm Back....Presenting Gingerbread Man-Cake

Alright, I want to begin by apologizing for the lack of updates over the past month. Its been a busy time and I haven't done much creative cooking, thus I wasn't inspired to post. But now I'm back, and hopefully back to a more regular posting schedule. So I'm beginning today with what one of my coworkers called Gingerbread Man-Cake. She said that tasted like gingerbread and was thick and dense, hence the gingerbread and the man portions of the name. Actually, everyone who had some, thought that it was a type of gingerbread, even though it wasn't.

This all began with my wanting to bake something so I looked through the "baking" cupboard (I keep all my baking related ingredients in one cupboard) and found that I had 2 spice cake box mixes. I made that my starting point. I then assembled the other ingredients (see picture below).
It might be hard to see everything, so let me go through the list quickly. There are eggs, oil, cocoa, nutmeg, butterscotch chips, and chocolate chips. And I also used some water (about a cup I believe). I baked the cake in the tart pan seen the picture. The bottom lifts out; which was really good since the chips sunk to the bottom of the cake and stuck to the pan a little.

I sort of followed the directions for the cake mix. I put in the 3 eggs it called for and put in about 1/3 cup of oil. I say about since I just eyeballed it. If you've read my blog, you know my stance on box cake mixes, they are about impossible to mess up. I then added some water to thin down the batter and put in about a 1/2 teaspoon of ground nutmeg and probably 2 tablespoons of cocoa. The consistency was about right for a standard cake batter at this point so I stirred in the chips (which together were probably 1 and 1/2 cups worth).

Since I was using a very shallow pan and the batter almost filled it fully, I reduced my baking temperature to 320 F. It took significantly longer to bake, but it stayed relatively thin (it did rise above the pan but not by a great deal).

After it had cooled I cut the cake into wedges and put it on a tray that I took to work the next day. The cake went pretty quickly (and I noticed a few people going back for seconds).

Here is the final result:One note, I should have taken the picture in a different location. The background of the table is too close in color to the cake. Oh well.