Week 37 brought a highly anticipated envelope in the mail: my Minnesota State Fair scorecards. Eep! I'd been looking for these every day since the fair ended and was excited to see what the verdicts were. Due to the sheer number of entries, only the top 25 entries in each categories get official score cards. Sadly, my sweet buns and sugar cookies didn't make it into that tier. This was unsurprising as these were two of my weaker entries. (The sweet buns are really best eaten the same day and preferably warm out of the oven; also made better with a custard filling or Chinese bbq pork, neither of which were allowable under the fair guidelines). The brownies (also subpar) garnered an 84/100. The green tea layer cake scored an 85/100 with lowest of the sub-scores in the flavor/aroma category; appearance sub-score was pretty good, though, and now I have regrets of not doing a bit of piping to make things less minimalistic. My chocolate bundt scored really quite well: 89/100! Appearance and flavor got high marks and I got judge verification that the inside was just a little under, as I had suspected. Who knows what could have been had I just left the darn thing in the oven for 5 more minutes.
Armed with this knowledge, I decided to do some more bundt practice. Into the baking box I went, to carefully extricate a couple bundt pans. (For those that don't know, I have a giant plastic tub on the bottom shelf of the pantry that contains a truly excessive number of cake pans, tart pans, springforms, tube pans, square pans, bundt pans, and miscellaneous molds all nestled in a very specific Tetris-master configuration. Each foray into the box threatens the equilibrium and has a high probability of baking pan chaos. It's a bit like Mary Poppins' magic carpetbag in there.)
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| Chocolate and whiskey bundts |
First up was a chocolate bundt recipe from
Baked: Celebrations that I'd been curious about for quite some time. It was dark cocoa bundt with whiskey glaze. Interestingly, the cake itself was made with a little oil (no butter) and then lightened with a truly luxurious amount of whipped cream. I had my doubts, but wouldn't you know it, the cake was some of the nicest texture and crumb that I'd had in a while! I put in some Japanese scotch whiskey in the glaze, which I made a bit too thick, and therefore topped with some sprinkles to give the whole thing a faux donut look. Which is great because when I brought some to ultimate, I had the following exchange:
Kid: "Did you bring cookies?" Me: "Mmm, no. But I did bring cake." Kid: "Does it have sprinkles?!" Me: "YES!" Kid: "But we have to wait until after the game to have a treat?" Me: "Well, yes."
For my other bake, I tried my hand at the chai-spiced pound cake recipe from the King Arthur "Year of the Bundt" series. It's a lovely recipe, though I did make a few adjustments as to when to add spices etc. Oh, and added some white pepper into the mix. I remembered, too, that I am a big fan of the so-called "dirty chai" from Starbucks and so decided to put an espresso glaze on top. It totally worked and the bites with the glaze was, for me, easily the best part of the cake.
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| Dirty chai-spiced bundt |
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