Chocolate Bundt Cake for 3rd Birthday

My son's 3rd birthday was in the beginning of November. I was planning to make the Milk Bar Birthday Cake, and even had all of the ingredients. Unfortunately, I had a fibromyalgia flare, which causes pain and fatigue. And . . . I went with a mix!

A while ago, my church had a chocolate cake Bake-Off, and I and my Chocolate Sour Cream Cake came in second. The first place winner was the Chocolate Cavity-Maker Cake, which uses a mix. It seemed a great choice for my sons birthday cake, especially after I found this Number Three Cake made from 2 Bundts.

It's a very easy cake.

I put in my mixer bowl one chocolate cake mix, one 4 ounce chocolate pudding mix, 8 ounces of sour cream, and 3 eggs.

I added ⅓

I added 1/3 cup vegetable oil and 1/2 cup water (the recipe calls for coffee flavored liqueur) and mixed until smooth.

Then I mixed in 12 ounces or 2 cups semisweet chocolate chips. It was a very nice, thick batter.

I sprayed my Bundt pan very thoroughly with Baker's Secret flour and oil spray, which has given me the most success with Bundt pans. It transferred the batter to the pan and smoothed it out a bit.

I baked the cake at 350 and checked it after 50 minutes, though it ultimately took 70 minutes. The cake should be damp in the middle. I cooled the cake completely, turning it out onto a rack after 15 minutes.

The next day I repeated the whole process.

After both cakes were cool, I cut and arranged them into the shape of he number 3.

 

As you can tell from the crumb coat (American buttercream), the cake was difficult to ice, which I think is a feature of cakes from a mix. If it wasn't for a birthday, I would serve it without icing, as it was sweet enough as it is.

I decorated with sprinkles and everyone was really happy with the cake. I personally ate the un-iced bits I had cut out to make the 3.

It was a good lesson for me, and reminded me that cake mixes exist for a reason.

On a personal note, I'm going to try to get back into blogging. My mothers cancer seems to be completely gone, and I'm feeling interested in cooking and writing again.

 

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Christmas Re-cap

I'll admit, I'm a little burned out from all the baking I did for Christmas—mostly cookies.

I didn't fulfill my ambitious Christmas baking plans. I am happy with what I got done.

The above cake is a Chocolate Sour Cream Bundt cake from a Cooks Illustrated recipe. The pan is Nordic Ware Gingerbread House Bundt Pan, and I'm super impressed with the quality and the detail. My son and I decorated the cake later, but I didn't get a picture :-(

This is my favorite of the Christmas cakes I made. It's the Paula Deen recipe for Red Velvet Cake and my American Buttercream. I do not recommend making the cake as written, but it's close enough that I plan to work on the recipe. For the decorations I used palettes (thank you Shannon Weber for letting me know the name of the circle sprinkles), star sprinkles, and silver glittery coarse sugar. I feel quite emphatically that Christmas decorations should be unrestrained rather than tasteful.

My favorite of the cookies I made was the Compost Cookies from Momofuku Milk Bar. A good online adaptation of the recipe is a Amateur Gourmet, though I recommend the much more specific original. My mix-ins were potato chips, mini-pretzels, chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, toffee bits (yum!), and oatmeal. My husband suggested I rename them Candy Bar Cookies, because they taste like a candy bar. I'll do a full blog post on them someday. :-)

My Dad's birthday is December 25th, and for his cake I made the Chocolate Sour Cream Cake that won my Chocolate Cake Taste Test and a brand-new original Fudge Frosting that I will post soon. It was so good that I'm making the cake and frosting again for my birthday later this month.

How did your Christmas go? Did you try to do too much as well?

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7-Up Cake

I have a new Bundt pan I wanted to use and was having some friends over for dinner, so I decided to try making a 7-Up Cake.
I first saw 7-Up Cake on an episode of Sam the Cooking Guy called "Grandmas." I later read about it at Cooks Country. Recently I've been reading Bakewise by Shirley O. Corriher (a really wonderful book). Shirley goes on a bit about the perfect tender and moist pound cake and I had a light bulb go off that I could apply Shirley O. Corriher's ideas about pound cake to 7-Up Cake.
I read several recipes for 7-Up Cake online and found a lot of consensus. The recipes I worked from are Squidoo, Allrecipes, Undercover Caterer, Epicurious, and Texascooking.com.
In Bakewise, Shirley O. Corriher describes the Ultimate Pound Cake as a generic formula:
3 cups flour
3 cups sugar
1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups fat
5 or 6 eggs
1 tsp leavening
2 to 3 teaspoons flavoring
1 cup liquid
This formula pound cake lines up pretty well with the 7-Up cake recipes I found. The biggest difference I see is the leavening. I reasoned that a teaspoon of baking powder would compensate me not creaming the butter and sugar the Full 20 Minutes as instructed in several recipes.
Almost every recipe called for lemon and lime extracts or zest or both. Several comments on Epicurious called for quite a bit of zest to balance the sweetness of the cake. First, I had juice, not zest or extract, and they are NOT interchangeable. Second, this is a Southern cake, so Go Sweet or Go Home! And third, I don't feel that a 7-Up Cake NEEDS to necessarily be a lemon-lime cake. Did I mention that I didn't have any flavorings? So I made the cake without zest or extracts., which I don't regret at all.
I noted that soda is a very sugary liquid, but decided not to compensate for the extra sugar, as none of the other recipes did.
Some of the recipes I found used all butter, others used a mixture of butter and shortening. In "Shirley's Even Greater American Pound Cake" in Bakewise, Shirley O. Corriher uses a combination of butter, shortening, and canola oil. I'm a fan of liquid oils in baking as it seems to make the baked goods more moist, so I decided to follow Shirley's example.
Everyone loved the cake, especially me :-) I really liked the subtle 7-Up flavor, which is funny because I haven't drank it since I was a kid.

7-Up Cake
Serves 8 to 12

6 ounces or 1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, soft
3 3/8 ounces or 1/2 cup shortening
21 ounces or 3 cups white sugar
1/3 cup vegetable oil
5 eggs at room temperature
13 1/4 oz or 3 cups bleached all-purpose flour, spooned and leveled (I used White Lily)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon table salt
1 cup 7-Up (I use W-Up from Wegman's, because I'm cheap)

Glaze
5 ounces or 1 cup confectioners sugar, approximately
1/4 cup 7-Up

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a 12-cup Bundt pan (don't spray, it doesn't work).
Whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt very well.
Beat the butter on medium speed until soft, about 30 seconds depending on the temperature of your butter. Add the shortening and beat to combine. Add the sugar and beat on medium for 3 minutes, or until it looks like crunchy, fluffy frosting. Slowly beat in the vegetable oil; don't add it all at once or it might curdle.
Add the eggs one at a time, mixing on medium after each one until it is incorporated.
Add 1/3 of the flour mixture, 1/2 of the 7-Up, 1/3 of the flour, 1/2 of the 7-Up, and 1/3 of the flour, mixing on medium-low after each addition until just incorporated.
Give the batter a final stir with a silicone spatula, scraping the sides and bottom and making sure everything is OK. I usually taste for flavor here.
Scrape the batter into the Bundt pan and gently level with the silicone spatula. Tap the pan on the counter twice to dislodge any air bubble.
Bake 60 minutes or until a tester or sharp knife poked in comes out clean.
Cool to room temperature in the pan.
For the glaze, pour the 7-Up into the powdered sugar and whisk until smooth. Correct thickness with more soda or sugar. Attempt to drizzle to glaze over the cake artistically, while making sure to cover any patches where the crust is dislodged.