I made it for the first time yesterday (1/2 recipe with 1 box of cake mix) and it came out great except that it was waaay too sweet. I used orange extract instead of almond because I didn't have any almond. It gave it a nice fruity taste but it was entirely too sugary. If I use half a cup of sugar or even a quarter cup of sugar will it change the consistency of the cake?

I used orange and vanilla flavoring. What other flavors besides almond are good with this cake?

What do you have to do if you wanted to use chocolate cake mix for this recipe? Are there links in the recipe section? Thanks all.

I think you can probably cut the sugar back without much trouble. I am primarily a scratch baker and frequently cut sugar amounts, depending on what I'm making.

I looked over the recipe and 1 cup extra sugar seems to be an awful lot extra to add. I wouldn't put in more than half a cup.

Baking is a science, cooking is an art:

http://www.bakingandbakingscience.com/Cakes.htm

Significantly altering a recipe/formula will unbalance it resulting in less than satisfactory results.

Sugar adds sweetness, but also impacts the volume, tenderness, texture, color, and acts as a preservative:

http://www.joyofbaking.com/sugar.html

If you start with DH cake mix, which doesn't include pudding (extra sugar & thickeners) you're ahead of the game in the sweetness dept.

Heres' the expanded flavors version of the WASC cake recipe:

http://tinyurl.com/2cu8s4

HTH