Bundt Cake #1 of BCS4: Bundt Cake Disaster!

As you may recall, Bundt Cake Season 4 started on October 31st. The Main Squeeze and I were among hundreds of thousands of people in New England who lost power in the evening of Saturday, October 29th in a freak snow storm that brought down lots of branches and whole trees (since the snow hit so early, most of the trees still had their leaves. That, combined with the heaviness of the snow, led to the downing of trees and the breaking off of tree limbs. In fact, our back porch was damaged from a large branch hitting it). We were lucky, because our power returned by Monday morning. Once the power returned, among the many things that I wanted to do to take advantage of once again having electricity was to bake a bundt cake and get Bundt Cake Season 4 started!

Months ago, I had found a recipe on the web that I wanted to use to start BCS4, but unfortunately, I didn't have at least two key ingredients, and I wasn't about to venture to the store when it was sure to be insanely packed. So, I found another recipe whose ingredients I did have: Lemon Ginger Cake from Kiss My Bundt.

I had forgotten that I used up my baking spray, but I figured, no big deal, when I first started baking bundts, I used the old butter and flour method, I'd just do that. I don't know what happened (I'm guessing I didn't grease the pan thoroughly enough), but I had my first experience of the cake not releasing from the pan. I kept letting it sit for 15 minutes and trying to turn it out, but no go. I even tried to ease it out using a silicon spatula. I finally had to take desperate measures. I think I ultimately had to use a knife to get it out.

It wasn't pretty. In fact, I think it's safe to say it was an aesthetic disaster. See for yourself:

Well, at least it tasted delicious.

Sadly, I had made a lemon ginger syrup to pour over it, to give it a stronger ginger flavor, but clearly, a syrup would have just have made it soggy.

Did I mention that we had invited friends who were still without power over for dinner? And after all the work that went into this cake, I wasn't about to just toss it. The Main Squeeze had an excellent suggestion: serve it in bowls. Which is what I did. With the syrup on the side for folks to put on their cake as they liked.

It really was quite tasty. Since it was a fresh ginger cake, without the ingredients that would have made it more spicy (like molasses ), the ginger flavor was on the subtle side. And this was after I added more ginger than the recipe called for. I also was probably a little too generous with the lemon zest, as I think the lemon flavor dominated the ginger flavor a bit.

If you're looking for a cake with more of hint of ginger than an intense gingerbread experience, then this is the cake for you. Omit the lemon zest if you'd like just a simple, fresh ginger cake.

Ginger peeling hint: The best way to peel ginger is to use a spoon. Seriously. That way you remove just the thin skin without losing any of the delicious root.

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon of freshly grated ginger (I don't have a ginger grater, and my experience using a regular grater has been unsatisfactory, so I just chop it very finely.)

2 teaspoons lemon zest

1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1 1/4 cup whole milk (as always, I used the 1% I had on hand)

2 1/2 cups flour

2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon of salt

3/4 cup unsalted butter

1 3/4 cup sugar

3 eggs, room temperature

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Add grated ginger, lemon zest, and vanilla to milk. Set aside.

Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together. Set aside.

Beat butter with an electric mixer at medium speed until creamy, about two minutes.

Slowly add the sugar. Beat on medium speed until the mixture is fluffy, about two minutes.

Crack the eggs into a separate bowl and add to batter one at a time. Then beat on medium speed for an additional two minutes.

Beginning and ending with the flour mixture, mix 1/3 of the flour mixture into the wet mixture at low speed, then 1/2 of the milk, alternating until all ingredients are mixed.

Transfer batter to a cake pan that has been coated with a baker's cooking spray that includes flour. (If you are using mini bundt pans, fill them 3/4 full.)

Bake until an inserted toothpick or cake tester comes out clean--about 40 minutes for a regular-sized bundt pan.

Invert cake onto a cooling rack or serving plate. If cake resists, cool in the pan for 15 minutes before inverting. (HA!) If it still resists, give it another 15 minutes (double HA!).

I don't remember now what I did for the syrup, but I think I went with something like this:

1/2 cup of water

1/2 cup of sugar

1-2 tablespoons of grated ginger

1-2 teaspoons of lemon zest

If you happen to have some Domaine de Canton ginger liqueur, add some, that would be delicious--a couple of tablespoons, I'm guessing, would do nicely.

Combine all the ingredients in a small saucepan and place over medium heat. Bring to a boil and cook until slightly syrupy, about 5 minutes. Set aside to cool slightly.

If everything had turned out correctly, I would have poked holes in the cake with a skewer and poured the syrup over it.

Woohoo! I FINALLY Finished the BCS3 Posts!

Now it's on to Bundt Cake Season 4 posts! Wait until you see the first two cakes...

If you missed the last two cakes of BCS3, #16 - Cabernet Chocolate Cake with Blackberry Red Wine Glaze and #17 - "Pretty in Pink" Chiffon Cake (because I changed their post dates so they'd at least be found with their sister cakes), you can find them here and here. They were both delicious, and very different from each other. So check them out and see if you're in the mood for one or the other.

I am determined to get BCS3 wrapped up!

Sigh. We're over a month into Bundt Cake Season 4 and I still haven't finished the posts for Bundt Cake Season 3! Demerits for me. I'm officially four (yes, four!) cakes behind: two for Season 3 and two for Season 4. Also, National Bundt Cake Day went by without any recognition from me. I'd feel worse about that, but November is when all hell breaks out at work, so getting much done outside of that is really just not going to happen.

But let's try to get back on track, shall we?

BUNDT CAKE SEASON FOUR HAS BEGUN!

Yes, yes, I know I haven't wrapped up BSC3 yet, but once the power came back on (yes, I was among the hundreds of thousands of people without power thanks to the October 29th storm), I took that as a clear sign that it was time to get the Bundt Cake Season show on the road.

So, for the record, the first bundt cake of Bundt Cake Season 4 is a Lemon Ginger Cake. Recipe and analysis to follow at some point in the (hopefully) not too distant future.

An interlude between Bundt Cake Seasons

On Friday, I did a little pre-season bundting. (Yes, I know I haven't wrapped up BCS3 yet, even though it ended back in June. I still have two cakes to tell you about. I'll get to it sometime, you know, before the beginning of BCS4). The Main Squeeze and I were going to be visiting friends on Saturday and I wanted to bring the Red Velvet Mini Bundts that were so awesome from BCS3. So, I busted out my mini bundt pans and my Kiss My Bundt cookbook.

For some reason, the cakes weren't as tasty this time. The Main Squeeze and I agreed that they simply weren't chocolate-y enough. And I even added a little extra of the fancy Dutch-processed cocoa. The recipe only calls for one tablespoon, which seems like a tiny amount, but I'm sure that's what I put in last time. So, the next time I make these, I'm going to *at least* double to cocoa powder.

I didn't have time to go to the grocery store to buy ingredients, so I got what I needed from the local natural food store and fancy convenience store downtown. Unfortunately, this meant only regular cream cheese for the cream cheese frosting, and I have to say that I really prefer the neufchatel, at least for this cake. The tanginess of the neufchatel works really well with the tanginess of the cake itself. If, in the future, I only have regular cream cheese, I might just cut down on the sugar and maybe put in a little buttermilk for extra tang.

In the meantime, I'm just going to sit here and be a little perplexed about the fact that although I followed the recipe the same way each time, this time they weren't as fabulous.

Go figure.

Bundt Cake #17 of Bundt Cake Season 3: "Pretty in Pink" Chiffon Cake

I'm changine the publishing date for this, the final BCS3 cake, so that it falls with the rest of the cakes from this season (like I did with the 2nd to last cake). Even though that technically throws off the order of when I wrote the posts, I think it just makes the most sense to have all the BCS3 cakes together.

I extended Bundt Cake Season 3 into June, which is well past when it normally should have ended (remember part of the reason Bundt Cake Season is a season is so that one isn't baking--especially cakes that take a long time--during the warm months of the year), because I wanted to make this cake and I needed strawberries to be in season.

I never would have thought to "bundt" this recipe, if The Food Librarian hadn't mentioned in one of her posts that when she looks at cake recipes, she asks herself if she could bundt it. That totally opened up bundt cake possibilities in my mind. Especially since this cake is supposed to be made in a tube pan, I figured a bundt pan would be a perfectly reasonable substitute. Then, I just had to wait until June, for New England's short-lived strawberry season.

This cake was delicious! I think I may be making one late bundt cake for many years to come, so that I can make this during future strawberry seasons. It's a strawberry-lemon chiffon cake (my first chiffon cake), which means it's the sort of cake you have to be careful doesn't fall on you. I don't know if my cake rose as much as it was supposed to, but the texture was light and airy, so I think it turned out well. And the flavor was amazing! Exactly what you want on an early summer day, when strawberries are in season. Oh, and did I mention it has a delightful strawberry sauce?

On quick note on making the cake. I think in an earlier post that called for separated eggs I was all, "people say that room-temperature eggs are hard to separate, but I didn't have any problems." Yeah, not this time. I lost two eggs. And this cake calls for seven egg whites! So, it pained me to waste two eggs. Speaking of which, this recipe only calls for 2 egg yolks, so I ended up tossing 5 yolks, which was incredibly difficult for a woman raised to abhor wasting food. So, if anyone has a recipe that calls for just egg yolks, please let me know! And next time I make this cake, I'm going to follow the advice this cookbook has in their angel food cake recipe, which recommends separating the eggs while they're cold, and then letting the whites come up to room temperature (because they whip up better at room temperature).

The recipe is from Moosewood Restaurant Book of Desserts.

Cake Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups unbleached flour

1 cup sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup vegetable oil

2 large egg yolks

7 large egg whites

1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar

2 tablespoons confectioners' sugar

1/2 cup strained pureed fresh (or frozen) strawberries*

3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

2 teaspoons freshly grated lemon peel

* They recommend using a strainer to drain any excess liquid so you have a thick, smooth sauce, but I don't think I needed to do this.

Strawberry Sauce Ingredients:

(This sauce is really just sugared strawberries with lemon juice. But it's A) delicious and B) and key part of the cake.)

2 cups sliced fresh (or frozen) strawberries

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

sugar to taste

Directions:

I reversed the second and third steps so that I could beat the egg whites in my stand mixer, and then I transferred them to another bowl. Then I mixed the other ingredients in the stand mixer. But I'll give you the directions as they appear in the book, and you can figure out what method you prefer.

Preheat the oven to 325. Oil and lightly dust the cake pan with flour (I used baking spray, instead.)

Sift together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt into a large bowl. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and add the oil and egg yolks--but don't mix yet.

In another large bowl, beat the egg whites until soft and foamy. Add the cream of tartar and confectioner's sugar and continue to beat until stiff by not dry. (I think I had a small issue here, so I'd recommend waiting until the egg whites are closer to stiff--not just "foamy"--before adding the sugar and cream of tartar.) Without washing the beaters, beat the flour and oil mixture at low speed. Gradually add the pureed strawberries, lemon juice, and lemon peel, beating until just blended.

With a rubber spatula, gently fold a small portion of the egg white mixture into the batter. Then in five or six additions, fold the batter into the egg whites. The batter will be light and bubbly, with some egg whites showing. (I think I may have over-mixed the batter & egg whites, so be careful of that.)

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 25 minutes. Increase the oven temperature to 350 and continue to bake for another 20 to 25 minutes, or until the cake is well risen and a cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean.

While the cake bakes, combine the strawberries, lemon juice, and sugar for the sauce in a small bowl and set aside. Allow the sauce to sit at room temperature for at least 30 minutes before serving.

When the cake is baked, remove it from the oven and cool it upright in the pan for about 10 minutes, then turn it out onto a rack. When the cake is cool to the touch, gently lift it onto a serving plate and cool completely.

Cut the cake into wedges with a serrated knife and serve each piece topped with a generous 1/4 of strawberry sauce, and, if you like, whipped cream. (You can see that I skipped the whipped cream. It really wasn't necessary.)

I want a slice right now!

Bundt Cake #16 of Bundt Cake Season 3: Cabernet Chocolate Cake with Blackberry Red Wine Glaze

OK. Bundt Cake Season 3 has to be wrapped up! This has gotten ridiculous. I'm going to make the publishing date for this post (and the final BCS3 one) so that they fall with the rest of the cakes from this season. Let's hope that once I get caught up on BCS4, I stay on track! Sheesh.

My Mom came to visit me in May. I had had surgery at the beginning of the month and was still in recovery mode. While she was here, I definitely wanted to make sure we made a bundt cake together. Which also meant that I got to use my new bundt pan! Wheee! I handed her the various bundt cookbooks, and after identifying a couple that she wanted to try, we decided on the Cabernet Chocolate Cake with Blackberry Glaze from Kiss My Bundt.

Originally, I thought that we'd make the cake sometime on Saturday, but we ran out of time

(what with seeing Bridesmaids and the fact that I was taking two-hour naps as part of my recovery). Luckily, her flight out on Sunday wasn't too early, so we whipped up the cake that morning. Which worked out well, because it provided the perfect opportunity to use up the leftover strawberry champagne from the previous week's Strawberry Champagne Mini Bundts by making strawberry mimosas! Doesn't everyone like to drink and bake?

This cake actually has two toppings. In addition to the delicious Blackberry Red Wine Glaze, it also calls for either a chocolate glaze or chocolate ganache. I asked my mom which she wanted to make, and she decided on the glaze. Next time, I'd definitely go for the ganache instead. In part, I think that my new bundt pan doesn't lend itself well to glazes, because the sharp ridges don't offer the glaze much to cling to. But also, the blackberry red wine glaze does a nice job of soaking into the cake a bit, but the chocolate one just kind of ran off, whereas, a ganache, which is thicker would stick better to the cake, and then you'd get the full benefit of the chocolate flavor. Also? I used maybe a third of the chocolate glaze (the rest has been sitting in my fridge forever. I keep tasting it, and it's still good, I just haven't found a use for it yet).

The cake itself was deliciously moist and chocolatey. And that Blackberry Red Wine Glaze? So delicious! I think it was my favorite thing about the cake. I should definitely find other uses for it, so I have an excuse to make it in the future.

Here's the recipe:

Cabernet Chocolate Cake

Ingredients:

1 3/4 cup sugar

2 cups flour

3/4 cup high-fat cocoa powder

1 1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1 1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon of salt

2 eggs, room temperature

1 cup whole milk (I used 1% as usual, since that's what I have on hand)

1/2 cup vegetable oil

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1/2 cup water

1/2 cup Cabernet Sauvignon (or other dry red wine) (I used a Spanish red we had, it worked well.)

Cake directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Sift together sugar, flour, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl and set aside.

Combine the eggs, milk, oil, and vanilla. Using an electric mixer, beat on medium speed for 1 minute.

With the mixer on low speed, add dry ingredients to the wet, 1/2 cup at a time. Do this slowly so that the batter doesn't develop clumps. (Do not overmix.)

Combine the water and wine in a small saucepan and bring to a boil.

Slowly mix boiled water & wine mixture into the batter. Note: the batter will be thin.

Transfer batter to cake pan that has been coated with baker's cooking spray. Filing it 3/4 full.

Bake care until an inserted toothpick or cake tester come out clean - about 45 minutes for a regular bundt pan.

Invert cake onto a cooling rack or serving plate. If cake resists, cool in the pan for 15 minutes before trying again. If the cake still resists, cool in the pan for an additional 15 minutes. Cool completely before frosting, at least an hour.

Drizzle blackberry glaze (recipe below) over the cooled chocolate cake.

Pour warm chocolate ganache or chocolate glaze (recipe below) over blackberry glazed cake.

This is the cake sans either glaze.

Blackberry Red Wine Glaze

Ingredients:

4 tablespoons seedless blackberry fruit spread or preserves

1/3 cup Cabernet Sauvignon (or other dry red wine)

Directions:

In a small saucepan, whisk wine and blackberry preserves over medium heat.

Once incorporated, bring mixture to a boil and boil for one minute (this helps thicken the glaze).

Remove from heat and let mixture cool for 3 minutes.

Spoon over chocolate cake.

Dark Chocolate Glaze

Ingredients:

3/4 cup unsalted butter

6 ounces premium dark chocolate finely chopped or grated (I used dark chocolate chips)

2 tablespoons corn syrup

Directions:

In a small saucepan over medium-low heat, melt butter.

Remove pan from heat and mix chocolate into the butter, stirring until chocolate is completely melted.

Add corn syrup and whisk to a smooth glaze.

Let the mixture sit for 1 or 2 minutes to allow glaze to thicken slightly before drizzling over cake.