11th Inning Bundt

Ha ha!  Not a typo in the title!  It's Day 11 of NaBloPoMo '08, and true to my refusal to guarantee any useful or meaningful content whatsoever here this month, today I am going to show you pictures of my new bundt pan.

Please "ooh" and "aah" to yourself as the spirit moves you.

Isn't it beautiful?  This is the "Fleur De Lis" bundt pan by Nordic Ware, top view.  Here it is on the inside:

And just because it was fun to photograph, here it is from the side:

I went 45 years of my life never owning a real, genuine, Nordic Ware, bundt pan.  Within the last few years, I have begun to feel it more and more because I have spent more time in cookware shops and they tend to sell all the cutest shapes.  Often have I gone in for a silicone spatula or a plain wire whisk (you can never have too many of either) only to find myself diverted by the glory of cast aluminum that is the Nordic Ware Bundt® line.  I would touch them all.  I would dream.  Then I would look at the price tags, remember that I had a perfectly good, plain aluminum tube pan at home in my overstuffed cookware cupboards, sigh, and move along.

Now, this will seem unrelated, but bear with me.  The fact is, every year in August the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has a sales-tax-free Saturday.  I believe it is meant to keep back-to-school retail business from drifting over the border into New Hampshire, which is sales-tax-free all the time.  This year gas prices were so high and the economy has sucked so much and thus retail sales have been so very depressed that the Commonwealth held an entire sales-tax-free weekend, and we held it a week or two early.

Now, my true love and I, we own almost everything.  I mean it.  Really, almost everything.  We certainly live surrounded by more of everything than we actually have room for.  We even have multiples of some things.  And we don't have children, so we don't do the whole back-to-school thing.  So this year, as in most years, while we appreciated the opportunity to shop sales-tax-free locally, and while we did want to help out the local economy however we could, after our big emergency furniture expenditure which simply could not wait, we honestly couldn't think of a single thing to buy.

Then I remembered.  We did not have a bundt pan.  We also did not have the official Bundt Cookbook.

Ah.  So easy to fix.

Since my true love is hell-bent on spoiling me into my grave, he was shockingly easy to persuade to spend frighteningly close to $50 on a cake pan and a staple-bound, pamphlet-style cookbook.  ("Do you want one?" "Yes, I really do!"  "Okay.")  I have to tell you, though, he has not been sorry.

You see that?  That is the stub end of a succulent, sticky, yummy, genuine bundt cake made in a genuine bundt pan with a genuine Bundt Cookbook recipe.  It's the recipe for chocolate cherry cake on page 20 topped with the basic vanilla glaze on page 96, except of course I changed both to use all-natural, organically grown ingredients.  Specifically, I used no food coloring and no maraschino anything, just an entire 10 oz. bag of frozen dark, sweet, pitted cherries.  (Sour cherries would have been better, but I can never find them when I want them.)

There are many terrifying things in this cookbook, and I must confess that these artifacts of authentic American church-supper-and-potluck cuisine are part of why I wanted the cookbook at all.  Yes, I wanted a good, snide and smug laugh, but also I think I needed tangible confirmation that I hadn't imagined some of my mother's worst cooking.  (She could be so brilliant as a baker, but then when cooking the dinner you would have to eat before you would be allowed to taste dessert, she could betray you with something completely repulsive without even blinking, and then think you were crazy and also ungrateful for not relishing it.)  I didn't recognize anything specific, but rather a whole genre of "food" including but not limited to use of the word "salads" to describe sweetened gelatine molds; a "Party Meat Ring" incorporating ground beef, bread crumbs, peanut butter, horseradish and ketchup and garnished with fruit -- or ketchup and onion rings, chef's choice; something called "Golden Avocado Ring," which is made of lemon gelatine, canned pineapple, sour cream, two cups of white wine, and diced avocado; and a bunch of other things which, in my still-fragile state, will literally make me vomit if I so much as glance at the titles.

I have promised faithfully that in my own bundt-y adventuring, I will never inflict any of these items upon the palate of my true love and shall stick strictly to cakes and maybe some very basic, non-terrifying gelatine-and-fruit rings.

With that understanding, my true love is perfectly content for me to proceed.

And he should be.  The best cake of all that I have made for him yet was so rich it could only be eaten in slivers, dried out really fast because my cake saver is too big for the size cakes I typically make, and yet disappeared so fast that I never got to photograph it.  Poor Jana visiting our home one splendid day in September barely got a taste of it.  But anyway, here's the recipe, which is based on recipe for coffee pound cake on page 7 of the official cookbook, but altered according to suit my aesthetic and the contents of my pantry on the day I baked.

Note:  This made a very dry and crumbly cake, so I think in the future I may use sour cream instead of milk, replace some of the butter with shortening, and perhaps use three-quarters or half as many nuts.

Coffee Pecan Bundt Cake

5 T instant, decaffeinated coffee
½ C hot milk
1-1/3 C butter
1½ C mixed sugars that I happened to have around, including beige and brown
4 jumbo eggs
2-2/3 C all-purpose flour
1 T baking powder
½ T sea salt
1 C (after grinding) finely ground pecan halves

1.  Grease and flour a 10-12 C capacity bundt-style tube pan and set aside.

2.  Preheat oven to 350°F.

3.  Dissolve coffee in hot milk and let cool.

4.  In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar(s), then beat in eggs one at a time until well blended.

5.  In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt.  Then add to butter mixture in parts, alternating with parts of the milk/coffee mixture.  When all that is completely blended, fold in the nuts until fairly evenly distributed throughout the batter.

6.  Bake 50-60 min. or until tester comes dry.  Cool in pan for at least 15 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack or serving plate to complete cooling.

7.  When the cake is completely cool, place on a serving plate (if you haven't already) and glaze with this coffee glaze (which is the one on page 98 of the Bundt Cookbook, only halved and again altered to suit my aesthetic):

1 t instant, decaffeinated coffee (though I may actually have used a T, because I roll that way)
1½ T hot milk
1 C confectioner's sugar
½ T soft butter

Just blend it all together really well and then plop it evenly over the cooled cake.  Glaze will slowly ooze down the crevices.  Serve in slender slices as soon as you like.

See?  This was a completely frivolous post.  And now, possibly, you are either fatter, or hungrier and about to make an ill-advised nutritional choice, or just ragingly jealous of me and my fabulous boyfriend-and bundt-pan combo.  Sorry, but you were warned things could go this way.  Or some way sort of like this.

And just think:  There are nineteen more days of NaBloPoMo '08 to go.

Comments

[leslee]

Oh, raging jealous, of course. That's a beauty!

BTW, the last time I made pie I discovered the beauty of using coconut oil in place of the shortening half of the fat - worked like a charm. You can't keep the whole jar in the frig, but spoon out what you'll need and put that in the frig to harden - feels just like shortening.

[Kay Olson]

I do not believe that bundt cake is frivolous. It might be essential.

[Sara]

Leslee: I really do like that idea very much. And coconut oil is so good for you. The shortening I use in everything that calls for shortening is made of organic, nonhydrogenated palm oil, which I believe is also very healthful, but which softens incredibly easily. I've never gotten around to trying it in pie crust, because I don't really have a place to roll out pie crust anymore. This is because we own almost everything now, and so now we have no counter space.

This is the seamy underbelly of being completely spoiled: really ridiculous amounts of clutter.

Kay: See, now, I have always thought so, too, but I have been making do -- and quite deliciously, mind -- with bundt-y recipes in a non-bundt pan and without the official cookbook for so long that raving on and on about finally being correctly brand identified, well, it seems like a flimsy excuse to post a cake recipe, if you ask me.

Oh, wait... ;)

[kathy a.]

that is a most excellent bundt pan. and classic recipes, too!

[Ron Sullivan]

Party Meat-Ring... Party-Meat Ring... There's just something about that phrase. If you scanned that page and put it on Flickr, it'd be snapped up by the National Trust for Hysteric Preservation PDQ, IMO.

[Sara]

Is it closed-minded of me to doubt the deliciousness of meat baked with peanut butter, ketchup and horseradish? Is it?

[Johnwatersfan]

I don't know you, and I'm responding to a two and a half year old post, but I just had a flashback to my childhood recently and a bundt cake my friend's mother used to make. So I found a recipe online, and I ordered a bundt cake pan (the fleur de lys one actually).

Since ordering it (it arrives today!), I have been obsessively googling for bundt cake recipes and that's how I came across your blog. I'll probably try it out myself. However, I thought you might be interested in this recipe (if you haven't run across it yourself): http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/harvey-wallbanger-from-scratch-recipe?recipe_id=1208803870678

It's a from scratch version, as the original version of this cake was made with a box of cake mix and a box of instant pudding. But since I don't live in the US anymore, it's hard to come across these things, so I decided I'm going to try the from scratch version. If it's anything like the one I remember from being a kid, it's going to be amazing.

And on another random note, I went to a restaurant that had a "Skippy Burger" which was a beef hamburger with peanut butter and bacon. Because I'm insane, I gravitate toward trying these ridiculous combinations of food, and it was surprisingly tasty. So you never know when weird food combinations might work out!