What to Do with a Bottle of Cake Vodka

Like a triple tier birthday cake or a horrible birthday gift you have no way of returning, birthday cake flavored vodka might hang around your apartment long past its welcome. Sugar bomb shots topped with whipped cream and sprinkles will only get you so far. So we came up with a few cocktail ideas to exorcise that bottle from your home.

Note: Birthday cake vodka is actually pretty similar to whipped cream vodka, except with a very slight added tang of spongy yellow cake. Pretty much all of these ideas would work for whipped cream vodka and vice versa.

Celebrate Your Birthday with a Birthday Martini

There’s never a wrong time for a Martini—pre-dinner, post-dinner, breakfast, and even dessert. While many Birthday Cake Martini recipes call for other liqueurs like white creme de cacao, you can get away simply shaking together cake vodka and half & half (just stick to very dry Martini proportions—at least five to one vodka to half and half‚—to keep the mixture palatable). The result tastes like you spiked melted ice cream soup, and we’re not mad about it.

Candy Coat an Aviation

Cake vodka has the ability to make any drink taste like candy. It’s not that it makes every cocktail crazy sweet, but it will provide the fuzzy, comforting mouth feel of your favorite sweets. Swapping it into a classic Aviation preserves the delicate floral flavor but makes the drink taste velvety and rich.

Turn a Cosmo into a Jolly Rancher

A cake-spiked Cosmo is a two-part experience, with a wave of fruit flavor followed by a surge of almost tangy cake, but on the finish the drink tastes like a mystery flavor Jolly Rancher. Somewhere between cherry, watermelon and cranberry, the sweet drink lingers on the palate and the mind.

Make Pineapple Upside Down Cake in a Shot

This shot emulates its eponymous dessert in several ways. Like one massive bite of pineapple upside down cake, this shot of cake vodka, pineapple juice and grenadine packs serious fruity flavor. It’s layered, just like the inverted cake itself, with a dash of red grenadine sitting below a layer of yellow pineapple juice (and clear flavored vodka). And just like you can never stop after one bite of cake, you’ll find yourself going back for another cake shot quickly too.

Sweeten up an Espresso Martini

After a big dinner, please that friend with a sweet tooth with a cake-infused Espresso Martini by mixing 2 ounces of vodka, a half-ounce each of espresso and half & half, and a quarter-ounce of coffee liqueur. The touch of dairy gives the cake vodka some body to stand on, since a drier version tends to lose the sweet flavor.

Pop It in a Grasshopper

Go easy on the crème de menthe and up the cake vodka to 1.5 ounces (you can still use the full ounce of cream though), and you have yourself a light and minty cocktail that tastes just like mint ice cream.

Mix It with Soda for a New Vodka Soda

Cake vodka can transform any other ingredient you mix it with, including familiar sodas. Top it in a highball glass with Coke to make a boozy Vanilla Coke. Or top it with ginger beer for a spiced ginger cake in a glass.