Sweet Yet Sour

Cake, Cake and More Cake

Thursday, March 24th, 2011 | Wedding Cake Try-outs

A beloved friend who is getting married in June of 2012 has asked me to make a few cakes for her informal wedding.   The wedding is going to be held in her parent’s backyard, the groom will be wearing his best jeans, and her Aunt and cousins are making the food.  Sounds lovely to me!

It’s an honor really and I am going to enjoy making cakes for her.  So far, she hasn’t been specific about what she wants, just not the “traditional” wedding cake. She has been very clear about staying away from the highly decorated high layer cake with man and woman on top…  Since we all know I’m no cake decorator, that won’t be a problem, but I do want to make a few nice cakes.  I’d like to have a nice mix of things so that people who are chocolate people can get some chocolate and people who don’t like chocolate (despite having something seriously wrong with them!) can have an alternative.

In preparation for the wedding, and since I have more than a year before my deadline, I’m going to start a new blog series called “The Wedding Cake Try-Outs”.  I’ll be making a different kind of cake as often as I can, documenting the process and then writing a blog post about the cake.  I’m sorry that most of my readers are too far away to do tastings as well – but I do want you all to express your views about whether or not a specific cake is something you would like to have at an informal wedding.

I’ve decided to rely heavily on a book I received a long time ago for Christmas and have yet to touch, Dorie Greenspan’s, “Baking: From My Home to Yours”.  I adore Dorie, she’s always on NPR and seems like my kind of cook; sometimes she follows the recipe and sometimes she just throws stuff into a bowl and prays. And honestly, there are some beautiful looking cakes in the book that have been tempting me for a while.

My friend has a favorite of my cakes that I will also be making and putting up for a vote; it’s a layer cake of chocolate sourdough cake, a layer of chocolate mousse that I add gelatin too to stiffen it enough for it to be molded into a cake layer, either fruit or whipping cream in between the layers and a frosting of chocolate ganache.

But I have plenty of time for that, so I began with a recipe from Dorie’s book, “Nutty, Chocolaty, Swirly Sour Cream Bundt Cake”.  I picked this cake almost entirely on the basis that I had all of the ingredients and also that I thought I could get it done during the 1 hour I have to myself while both kids nap in the afternoon.

Dorie Greenspan’s “Nutty, Chocolaty, Swirly Sour Cream Bundt Cake”

For the swirl:

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped or 1/3 cup mini chocolate chips

1/3 cup plump, moist raisins (dark or golden) or dried currants

2 1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon

pinch of nutmeg

pinch of salt

For the cake:

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 3/4 cups sugar

grated zest of 1 orange

2 sticks (8 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature

2 large eggs

1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1 cup sour cream

I made the following modifications to the above ingredients: I used pecans not walnuts (I’m allergic) and I reduced the sugar in the cake to 1 1/2 cups for the altitude.  (High altitude cooking generally requires a reduction in the moisture in cake recipes, either by reducing the sugar, eggs or other liquids, otherwise cakes will, as I have learned countless times, sink in the middle. Granted, a bundt cake sinking in the middle isn’t really possible, but it will create a nice cavern in the center of the ring.)  Also, I didn’t have an orange, so I used some of my pure orange oil instead, about 1 tsp.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Butter a bundt pan and then dust with flour, shaking out the excess flour.

Mix all of the swirl ingredients together in a bowl and set aside. (It looks delicious all by itself!)

Whisk all of the flour, baking powder and salt together in a bowl.  Add the sugar and zest to a mixing bowl (I used my electric mixer) and rub them together until the sugar is fragrant.  With the paddle attachment beat on medium speed for 4 minutes.  Add eggs one at a time, beat for one minute after adding each one and then add the vanilla.  Slow the mixer down to low speed and add in the sour cream.  Add in the dry ingredients until they are incorporated into the batter.

Put 1/3 of the batter into the bundt pan and then evenly sprinkle in half of the filling.

Then add the remainder of the batter to the pan.  Make an indentation in the center of the ring of batter with the back of the spoon and then add in the remaining filling in the indentation.  Fold in the batter on the sides of the indentation.  (This is really tricky and I didn’t get it right; the batter is thick and it was terribly difficult to make an indentation, let alone fold it over the filling.)

Bake for 60-65 minutes, or as Dorie instructs “until a thin knife inserted deep into the center the cake comes out clean.”  Let the cake cool in the pan for 10 minutes before un-molding it from the pan.   Dorie suggests sprinkling the cake with powdered sugar once it cools, but I’m not a fan of that.   Next time I might make a glaze with some orange juice, powdered sugar and little melted butter, but it was a beautiful cake without anything at all on top:

I think that next time I will put less batter in before the initial filling addition, since the filling swirl seemed to be mostly at the bottom of the cake; I would like it a little more in the middle.  Also, I think next time I will reduce the amount of sugar in the filling mix itself.  With the nuts, raisins and chocolate chunks a good portion of the sugar sank to the bottom of the bowl and seemed like a waste.

I have to admit, I love this cake and will be making it again, whether or not I make it for the wedding.  The smell of the orange, chocolate and cake that filled the house was wonderful and the taste of the cake was even better.  Mike didn’t feel that the raisins were necessary in the filling, although he sure loved the cake and ate a lot of it, but I liked the contrast in the filling between the crunchy nuts, melted chocolate and soft raisins.

For me, this is a contender for the wedding because it is pretty simple – I got it done while the kids napped – and yet there are wonderful complex flavors.  If any of you want to come over and try some, just let me know and I can whip up another one lickety-split!

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