Fudge, Cake - need I say more?

Glaze pools in the center - yum!

This cake made me realize a few things:
1. I need a new bundt pan.
2. When a cake sticks to the pan (see item 1), chocolate sauce hides a multitude
     of sins.
3. Patience is a virtue I don't possess - waiting for this cake to cool seemed an
    eternity.
4. If you gave me some cold milk, I could probably eat this entire cake by
     myself.

So what is this marvelous cake? It is the Tunnel of Fudge Cake from Cook's Country. I changed it up a little-slightly. I saw this suggestion after I had the cake in the oven. Mixing 1T of butter with 1T of melted butter and coating the pan. This might have helped me with item 1, but I still think I need a new pan. It is a good brand pan (Nordic Ware) and a pretty fleur de lis design. I see they now offer it with a different coating. Chocolate cakes seem to stick worse than yellow cakes. My pan has a black coating and I'm wondering if that has something to do with the sticking issue. The version now looks like it's just metal. I'm thinking they must have had some issues with my style pan.

Stick, Stuck, Stinks

One of the changes I made was omitting the nuts. Sometimes I don't like nuts in cakes and this looked like one of those instances and my instincts were correct. I also added 1tsp of chocolate extract. Next time I would definitely cut the chocolate glaze recipe in half. I'm all for chocolate but I had at least 1 cup left over (and I was pretty generous with it on the cake). Not that the chocolate glaze is going to waste-don't worry I will find a use for it even if I'm forced to just eat it with a spoon. Here are the ingredients halved:

1/4 + 2T(or 6 T) heavy cream
2 T corn syrup
4 oz bittersweet chocolate, chopped
1/2 t vanilla extract

I would also recommend putting torn pieces of wax paper partially under the cake when you pour the glaze on the cake. Otherwise you will be cleaning up the dish from all the glaze that runs down. It's much easier just to pull the wax paper out. I had some pooling issues in the center but hey that's OK - a little extra glaze goes with each slice.

See that fudgey center

Follow the directions when it says to remove the cake from the oven when the cake starts to pull away from the sides. It looks like it is not set and you start to think that you should leave it in the oven for another 5 minutes - resist this urge. My oven is a "slow oven" and I always have to leave things in for about 5 extra minutes and I did this time. But I can see that if I left this cake in for another 5 extra minutes, it would not have had that fudgey center and that would really be a shame!

After cooling 1 1/2 hours-it will shrink a little

To Recap:

Grease the pan with a mixture of 1T melted butter and 1T cocoa powder
Follow the above measurements for the glaze
Wax paper under the cake while glazing the cake
Cold glass of milk as a go with

What's that mess under that glaze? There's nothing to see here...

New Kid on the Block

So here's a picture of the new kid on the block. Ain't she a beauty? It's a Blomberg . They are fairly new to the US. They have been around in Europe for quite a while. I really liked the design. I've been dying to have a freezer on the bottom. With the old refrigerator I would constantly lose brain cells by hitting my head on the freezer will poking around in the refrigerator. It really makes sense to have the refrigerator on top - that is where you spend most of your time. When we bought the old one, it was an emergency situation. The prior one was leaking on the floor and was no longer cooling. Fifteen years ago the freezer on the bottom was just starting to get popular but we were in no situation to wait for delivery. We had to take what they had on hand. Now the freezer on the bottom is by no means unique. What is - is this freezer's design. There are 3 compartments in the freezer. I used to have a chest freezer in the basement and everything would get los...

Mr. Boston

Since we were discussing cocktails, I thought I would discuss Mr. Boston . The Sous Chef has his father's Mr. Boston and then the girls one year for Christmas got him the new version. They are different enough that you need to keep both of them. We had once thought about working our way through the book but then decided that probably wasn't a good idea. We have found some really tasty treats though. Old Mr. Boston/New Mr. Boston Here is one of them: Banana Foster (from New Mr. Boston) 2 scoops vanilla ice cream 1 1/2 oz spiced rum 1/2 oz banana liqueur 1 medium banana cinnamon Combine ingredients in blender. Blend until smooth. Pour into a large glass and sprinkle with cinnamon I guess there is one improvement with the new Mr. Boston - the index is a bit better. In the old version, you cannot look up the drink by name. You can only look it up by liquor - which doesn't really help you out if you don't know what is in say a grasshopper and just wa...

Lemon Pasta

DO NOT be deceived by the blah-looking pasta you see here. This was such a creamy, lemony, yummy pasta. I found it in one of my old Fine Cooking magazines from 2006 (yes I do have so many recipes ripped from magazines that I've been dying to try that I needed to database them. This was the pre-gee-every-recipe-is-posted-online days. And we won't even discuss how many cookbooks I have with recipes awaiting testing!). Plus now that it looks like I have a job again, I better get cracking on some of these quick-cooking weeknight recipes! I didn't have fresh parsley, which would have made it a lot prettier looking. I also decided to use penne since that's all I had on hand. I used vodka too instead of the gin or grappa because once again that is what I had on hand. So maybe this isn't really the original recipe from the magazine, but it's still really good and you should try it! Trust me!

Chocolate-It's What's for Dinner

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