This week, I'm turning 25 (cue the quarter-life crisis?) and I was flipping through one of those old, obscure cookbooks I love so much when I came across one titled, "Whiskey cake." Um, hello birthday cake. The magic of cake plus the beauty of whiskey? A cake that can get you drunk? And thus a boozy birthday treat was born (just like me)!

The cookbook where I found this recipe is called, "Virginia Seasons: New recipes from the Old Dominion," and this recipe was submitted by Robin Traywick Williams. The original recipe calls for a box of white cake mix, but I really don't like to buy cake mixes, because I usually have all the ingredients for them anyway, so it's just one less thing I have to buy (it also included walnuts, which I decided to nix). So I substituted King Arthur Flour's recipe for "tender white cake," opted for butter over oil (always), added that delicious nectar called whiskey, and had a besotted feast.

The cake is moist (I never understood why people don't like that word — it describes an amazing cake) and heavy, kind of like a pound cake. The whiskey soaks into it, so the crust is the best part, since it's the booziest, plus has all that amazing powdered sugar. Yeah, this cake isn't, like, "good" for your New Years resolutions to lose weight or stop drinking, but that stuff is overrated anyway.