Showing posts with label #BundtBakers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #BundtBakers. Show all posts

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Nutella Bundt with Nutella Glaze #BundtBakers

Nutella Bundt with Nutella Glaze #BundtBakers Fudgy and soft with a subtle nuttiness, this Nutella Bundt cake with Amaretto and ground almonds, topped with slightly warmed Nutella, is a brownie-like confection that every chocolate or Nutella fan will love.
Fudgy and soft with a subtle nuttiness, this Nutella Bundt cake with Amaretto and ground almonds, topped with slightly warmed Nutella, is a brownie-like confection that every chocolate or Nutella fan will love.

When they were growing up and still at home, I would occasionally find an empty Nutella jar in one of my daughter’s bedrooms - most often the elder, if truth be told - scraped clean of sticky hazelnut chocolate and abandoned under the bed. They spread it on toast, rolled it up in crepes and, as just mentioned, ate it with a spoon. They come by Nutella love naturally, a tale you can read about here, along with a recipe for my Nutella Swirl Muffins. When they went off to university in Providence, no stores near them seemed to carry the creamy delight of our young lives. One year I even sent them jars ordered on Amazon as a special treat, in celebration World Nutella Day. When they were coming home for Christmas last year, I bought a very large jar of Nutella in anticipation (750g or 1.7 lbs by weight) and stashed it in the cupboard. It was opened, a little Nutella was eaten and then, the holidays over, they left. That big jar has been languishing there for eight months now, mocking me each time I opened the cupboard door, threatening to turn rancid, as old things with oil will ever do. I began to scour the internet for recipes with Nutella and finally settled on this one from Nigella Lawson’s site.

I had to adapt it slightly for lack of all the ingredients, but this is essentially Nigella’s cake, fudgy, soft and brownie-like in texture. The additional Nutella warmed and poured on top is mine though. I had to get through that jar, folks!

Without further ado, here’s my contribution to this month’s Bundt Bakers Sprinkles theme, hosted by Terri of Love and Confections. August is Terri’s birthday month and what better way to celebrate than with Bundts with sprinkles. Hope your birthday was the best, Terri!

Ingredients
For the cake:
6 large eggs
1/2 cup or 120g unsalted butter, softened
1 1/2 cups or 400g Nutella or whatever hazelnut chocolate spread you have on hand
1 tablespoon Amaretto liqueur
1 cup (spooned in, not tightly packed) or 100g ground almonds
3 1/2 oz or 100g dark chocolate
1 pinch salt

For the glaze:
1/2 cup or 135g Nutella

To decorate:
Some sprinkles, of course, to fit our theme

Method
Preheat the oven to 350°F or 180°C and prepare your Bundt pan by buttering and flouring it, or use the baking spray that already has flour in it. That's what I usually do.

Carefully separate your eggs into whites and yolks. Melt the chocolate for your batter in a microwaveable bowl using a few short zaps and stirring well in between. Set aside to cool.

In a large mixing bowl, use your electric beaters or stand mixer to beat the butter and Nutella together and then add the Amaretto, egg yolks and ground almonds. Beat well.



Fold in the cooled, melted chocolate.



In a large bowl, whisk the egg whites with the pinch of salt until soft peaks form.

Add a large dollop of the fluffy whites into the chocolate bowl and stir with a spatula or spoon to loosen the chocolate batter.

Now add the rest of the egg whites, a dollop at a time, folding gently to combine the whites with the chocolate batter with each addition. You are trying to keep it light so this is not the time to mix vigorously. Just gently fold.



Spoon your batter into the prepared Bundt pan, making sure to fill all the curves and crevices. I used my Nordic Ware heart pan (<Amazon affiliate link) with a 10-cup capacity.


Bake on the center rack of your preheated oven for about 40-50 minutes or until it is all puffed up and springs back when touched.

It was even higher when I first took it out but it didn't seem to appreciate my big oven mitt thumb on the tip of the heart. 

It starts to deflate when you take it out of the oven, but don’t be alarmed. This is just concentrating the fudgy-ness inside. Cool for 10 minutes then turn the cake out of the Bundt pan onto a wire cooling rack.



Allow to cool completely before attempting to decorate.

When the cake is cool, warm the Nutella gently in a microwaveable vessel until it can just pour. If it gets too hot and runny, let it cool until it is just pourable but won’t run down the sides of your cake too quickly. Scoop a little up with a spoon and drizzle it back into the vessel to test the consistency.

Pour the warmed Nutella onto your cake and decorate with the sprinkles of your choice, or perhaps some chopped nuts.



Enjoy!



Here are this month's "Sprinkles" Bundts:



BundtBakers


#BundtBakers is a group of Bundt loving bakers who get together once a month to bake Bundts with a common ingredient or theme. You can see all our of lovely Bundts by following our Pinterest board. We take turns hosting each month and choosing the theme/ingredient.

Updated links for all of our past events and more information about BundtBakers, can be found on our home page.




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Posted by at 4:41:00 AM 0 comments
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Thursday, July 16, 2015

Banana Pecan Bundt with Bananas Foster Frosting #BundtBakers

Mashed bananas and cream cheese add moisture and flavor to this wonderfully nutty Bundt cake, topped with rum-spiked bananas Foster frosting. 

Thanks to our creative host, Shilpi from Simply Veggies, this month’s Bundt Bakers theme is fruit and nuts. Any fruit or combination of fruits AND any nut or combination of nuts, but the Bundt has to have both fruit and nuts. My mind was swirling with the infinite possibilities, but I finally settled on bananas because there is hardly anything that adds both flavor and moistness to a cake like mashed ripe bananas, unless it’s softened cream cheese. And, with the two together, magic happens. My favorite nut is always pecan, so I added a generous helping of those. And then, the bananas and pecans reminded me of a muffin I made a couple of years back, based on that famous New Orleans dessert, Bananas Foster, and before I knew it, I was making a sort of Bananas Foster frosting too, but with added cream cheese. I hope you are going to like this one as much as I did!

Ingredients
3/4 cup or 170g butter, softened
8 oz or 227g cream cheese, softened (13 Kiri squares, if that’s your brand, like it is mine here in Dubai.)
1 1/2 cups or 300g sugar
2 large eggs
3 cups or 375g all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups mashed bananas (1 1/4 pounds or 570g unpeeled bananas, about 4 medium)
2 cups or 210g chopped pecans, toasted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For the Bananas Foster frosting:
2 tablespoons or 45g butter
1/3 cup, packed, or 66g dark brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
Pinch salt
1 medium banana
2 tablespoons rum
1/4 cup or 26g chopped pecans
2 oz or 26g cream cheese (4 1/3 Kiri squares)


Method
Preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C and grease and flour a large Bundt pan. (I like to use the baking spray that has flour in it. The pan is my Nordic Ware Anniversary Bundt pan.) Add a 1/4 cup or about 26g of the chopped toasted pecans to the pan. Set aside.


Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a mixing bowl. In another smaller bowl, mash your ripe bananas with a fork.



In a large mixing bowl or the bowl of your stand mixer, beat butter, cream cheese and sugar at medium speed with an electric mixer until creamy and light. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well in between.



Add in the flour and mix well. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and add in the mashed bananas and the vanilla. Beat again for about one minute.



Fold in the rest of the pecans.



Spoon the batter into your prepared Bundt pan and bake in your preheated oven for about 50-60 minutes, tenting the top with foil if it looks like it’s browning too quickly near the end. Do not do what I did which was to turn the oven off when the timer rang and forget to take it out for another 10 minutes! As you can see from the photos, it turned out a little darker than it should have.


Remove from the oven and allow to cool for about 10 minutes before  turning the banana pecan Bundt out of the pan. Leave to cool completely before frosting.



To make the bananas Foster frosting, melt your brown sugar and butter in a small skillet, along with the pinch of salt and cinnamon.


Chop your banana into small pieces and add them to the pan.

Cook for several minutes on a low to medium flame, stirring occasionally. When the mixture has thickened a little, add in the rum and stir well.


Add in the chopped pecans and stir again. Remove from the heat leave to cool for a few minutes.



Now add in the cream cheese, cut or broken into small pieces. Stir until it’s all melted and no little white bits are showing. I must confess that I prefer the color of the frosting without the cream cheese because it’s a nice warm shiny brown and the cream cheese dulls it, but the flavor is great!



Spoon the frosting on your cooled Bundt cake and spread it around so a little slides down the sides.



Enjoy!

Dark still delicious!


BundtBakers


#BundtBakers is a group of Bundt loving bakers who get together once a month to bake Bundts with a common ingredient or theme. You can see all our of lovely Bundts by following our Pinterest board. We take turns hosting each month and choosing the theme/ingredient.

Updated links for all of our past events and more information about BundtBakers, can be found on our home page.




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Posted by at 2:36:00 AM 0 comments
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Thursday, June 18, 2015

Bee's Knees Lemon Honey Bundt #BundtBakers


Based on the Prohibition era cocktail called Bee’s Knees, this lovely buttermilk-pound-cake textured Bundt is flavored with honey and lemon, spiked with gin and finished with a gin honey lemon glaze sprinkled with lemon zest. 

A couple of weeks ago, one of my fellow Bundt Bakers asked for a Pimm’s cake recipe in another Facebook group. I had never heard of such a thing so I did a quick web search and found several. Pimm’s is one of our favorite summer drinks, made with lots of fresh fruit and cucumber so I was most intrigued. Deon’s cake is not on the list list below but you can see his Pimm's Bundt here.  I was inspired to check out some other lemony cocktails to recreate as a Bundt and settled on this one called Bee’s Knees popular during the American Prohibition.

Ingredients
For the cake batter:
1 cup or 226g unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups or 300g sugar
2 2/3 cups or 335g all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
Zest one small lemon
1 cup or 240ml buttermilk
1/4 cup or 60ml gin
1/4 cup or 60ml honey
1/4 cup or 60ml lemon juice
3 large eggs, at room temperature

For the lemon honey gin glaze:
3/4 cup or 95g confectioners' sugar or as needed to get the consistency you’d like.
1 tablespoon lemon juice
2 teaspoons gin
2 teaspoons honey
Pinch salt

To decorate:
Zest one lemon

Method
Preheat the oven to 350°F or 180°C. Generously grease and flour a 10-cup Bundt pan. Mine is a Nordic Ware Chrysanthemum pan. I’d love to put an affiliate link for that one but it’s been discontinued. Sorry!

In a stand mixer cream your butter combine the butter and sugar until they are light and fluffy.

Sift together the flour, baking soda, and salt.  Zest one lemon into the flour and mix.



Zest your second lemon on to a paper towel and set aside.


Measure out your honey, gin and lemon juice and add it to the buttermilk. Mix well.


Add the eggs to the butter-sugar mixture, one at a time, beating well and scraping down the bowl after each addition.



In three additions, add 1/3 of the flour mixture and one third of the liquid mixture, beating well in between. Scrape the bowl down before each new addition.



Spoon the batter into your prepared Bundt pan, making sure to fill all the little crevices.



Bake until the center of cake springs back when touched and a skewer inserted near the center comes out clean, around 55 or 65 minutes.



Remove the cake from the oven and let it cool for at least 10 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.


In a small bowl, combine, the lemon juice, gin, honey and pinch of salt. Add in the icing sugar a little at a time, whisking well between additions until all the sugar is dissolved. Keep adding icing sugar and whisking until you reach your desired consistency.


Drizzle the glaze over the cake. Sprinkle with the zest of the second lemon which should have dried out somewhat from sitting on the paper towel.


Enjoy!



If you are a fan of lemon in baked goods, this is the Bundt Baker month for you! Many thanks to our host Anne of From My Sweet Heart!

BundtBakers

#BundtBakers is a group of Bundt loving Bakers who get together once a month to bake Bundts with a common ingredient or theme. You can see all of our lovely Bundts by following our Pinterest board right here. We take turns hosting each month and choosing the theme or ingredient. Updated links for all of our past events and more information about BundtBakers can be found on our homepage.


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Posted by at 2:00:00 AM 0 comments
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Thursday, May 21, 2015

Culture Confusion Rocky Road Bundt #BundtBakers

This Bundt is a riot of cultural influences and flavors and colors that somehow come together to create one of the richest Bundts I’ve ever baked: Turkish delight, dried apricots, syrupy stem ginger, pistachios, dried cranberries and date molasses, in a Jamaican ginger batter, finished off with a decorative flourish of American marshmallow fluff.
This is the TCK or third culture kid of cakes, feeling the pull of the Far East, Middle East, Jamaica by way of the British Isles and the United States as well. This month our Bundt Baker host, Laura of Baking in Pyjamas, challenged us to bake a Bundt with the flavors and ingredients of Rocky Road. For those unfamiliar, rocky road is an unbaked confection that usually contains nuts, fruit, chocolate and marshmallows, sometimes cookies, but a little research soon revealed that the combinations depend greatly on where one lives.  I was intrigued by a recipe on Taste.com.au for a Turkish Delight Rocky Road and decided to use those basic ingredients, but baked in cake batter. (And substituting a North American ingredient, cranberries, for the glacé cherries because glacé cherries? Just no.)

Ah, but which cake batter? Sure, I could have done a plain cake but if you’ve been reading along here a while you know that I don’t often take the easy way out. I like a challenge. So I started looking for a cake recipe with Turkish delight and came across this moist and beautiful ginger loaf baked with fond memories of her English childhood, from my fellow UAE blogger, Sally of My Custard Pie. Now Sally’s ginger cake was already loaded with flavor and the only thing Turkish delight about it ended up being a gorgeous pink rose flavored icing. But I could already taste all of my added flavors baked in that fabulous batter. It’s a gift.

To finish it off Rocky Road style, I piped on some marshmallow fluff. Only after it was baked did I realize that, with so much going on, I forgot chocolate. Sorry, Laura!


Ingredients
For the cake batter:
1/2 cup or 90g dried apricots
1 cup or 150g unsalted pistachios, divided
1/2 cup or 85g dried cranberries
 3 1/2 oz or 100g Turkish Delight
1 knob of stem ginger
2 cups or 250g flour plus a little extra for flouring Bundt pan
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon ground (powdered) ginger
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
1/2 cup, firmly packed, or 100g brown sugar
1/2 cup or 113g unsalted butter
1/2 cup or 120ml golden syrup
1/3 cup or 80ml date molasses (Normal molasses can be substituted.)
1 generous tablespoon syrup from jar of stem ginger
1 large egg
2/3 cup or 155 ml milk

To decorate:
1/2 cup marshmallow creme or fluff or use a thick glaze of your choosing
Cranberries and pistachios, amounts as per the instructions below

Method
Finely chop about one quarter of your pistachios in a food processor. You are looking for a lot of pistachios dust, very fine crumbs and some small pieces.



Roughly chop the rest of your pistachios with a knife and set aside about one quarter of them to decorate the Bundt after baking.

Cut your cranberries, apricots and Turkish delight into small pieces.  Using scissors is easier than the knife. Mince your stem ginger.  Set aside about one quarter of the cranberry pieces for decorating the cake after baking.


Preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C and liberally butter and lightly flour your 10-cup Bundt pan. In case you are curious, mine is the Nordic Ware Fleur de Lis.  <affiliate link

Now sprinkle the finely chopped pistachios around the side and middle of the Bundt pan. The bigger pieces will not stick and will fall into the deep grooves of the pan. This is a good thing.



Sift the flour for the cake into a large mixing bowl and add in the baking powder, ginger, baking soda and salt. Mix well.

Add the cut apricots, Turkish delight and the bigger pile of cranberries to the flour mixture and use your hands to make sure they are all well coated and not sticking together.



In a large saucepan, gently warm the golden syrup, date molasses and the ginger syrup with the brown sugar and butter till the butter is just melted and the sugar has dissolved. Set aside.



Measure your milk into a measuring jug, add in the egg and whisk well with a fork.

Pour your barely warm molasses mixture into the flour bowl then add the milk with egg and the minced stem ginger. Mix lightly.



Fold in the larger pile of chopped pistachios.



Pour the batter into your prepared Bundt pan.



Bake on the middle shelf in your preheated oven for 40-45 minutes or until a wooden skewer comes out clean. The cake should be pulling away from the sides slightly.



Allow to cool on a wire rack for 10 minutes, then use your wooden skewer to loosen any bits of cake adhering to the sides or middle of the Bundt pan, before turning the cake out.



Allow to cool completely before decorating.

To decorate, put your marshmallow fluff in a piping bag and follow the contours of your cake. My initial plan was for fuller coverage but the diamonds that appeared on top because of the pistachios were too cool to hide, so I ended up not using all the marshmallow fluff. If you have a traditional Bundt pan, just pipe that sticky stuff all over.



Poke bits of cranberry and pistachio all over the cake until you think there’s enough or you run out. Over the past 20 years I’ve had a couple of good friends who have baked and decorated with me and they will tell you that I often need to be stopped when contemplating the addition of just one more thing. But more is more, I say.



A note on marshmallow fluff: It’s not the best medium to stick stuff to a cake, even a cold cake, because it starts to slide. If you aren’t trying to mimic rocky road ingredients, feel free to substitute your favorite glaze. Perhaps even Sally’s pretty in pink Turkish Delight one or her alternate option, flavored with fresh lemongrass.



Many thanks to Laura from Baking in Pyjamas for this great theme. I know you all are going to enjoy the variety of flavors and cakes we have for you today! Remember, just because it's called Rocky Road, doesn't mean it's all the same inside!


BundtBakers


#BundtBakers is a group of Bundt loving bakers who get together once a month to bake Bundts with a common ingredient or theme. Follow our Pinterest board right here. Links are also updated each month on the BundtBakers home page.


Aaaaand, if you happen to have extra marshmallow fluff and a willing pooch (and by willing I mean he sits patiently waiting for a taste whenever I fill a green piping bag - he knows!) then by all means, give him a mustache and let him lick it off.  Hey, it's his 8th birthday on Saturday. Special treat.

















Posted by at 3:45:00 AM 0 comments
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