I haven’t blogged this week because I’ve been so freakin’ busy at work doing the stuff they pay me to do that I haven’t had time to think. And yet Tuesday I came home and made the most complicated, most likely to be a disaster cake I’ve ever baked because I lack the common sense that God gave a doorstop.
And to prove my love for Nigella Lawson.
Two weeks ago Saturday, I was watching the Food Network because that’s what I do on Saturday mornings, and I saw a show featuring Nigella Lawson, that sexy, buxom British beauty who enchants me. On this very special episode, Nigella does Christmas and she baked a cake in this Bundt pan that looked like a grove of Christmas trees.
I squealed like a bitch. HAD to have it.
So I went to Amazon and ordered it. Here’s a picture of what the eventual cake should look like.
Now I should have gone online and looked up Nigella’s recipe, because she never makes anything that’s overly complicated. Instead I decided to make the recipe that came with the cake pan.
And if this cake comes out even slightly edible, I feel like I could pass myself off as a French pasty chef.
There are 14 ingredients in this cake. That’s a lot. Especially if you are used to adding oil and eggs to a box mix. Which I confess that I usually do.
So I assemble all the ingredients because if there is one thing I know for sure about cooking and baking, you are far more likely to succeed if you get all the ingredients out first. Mise en place, as the French say: everything in it’s place.
I greased and sugared the pan (Paula Deen trick: don’t use flour, use powdered sugar for cake pans) and then started mixing all this stuff. Cream the shortening and sugar. Add egg whites and beat till fluffy. This meant I got to use my nifty new egg separator that was supposed to be in my stocking.
Add in vanilla pudding mix, vanilla extract and sour cream. Mix all that. Sift in half of the flour/baking powder/salt mixture. Add in 3/4 of the milk. Mix and add the rest of the flour.
At this point I am thinking I would never do all this even if I was a man trying to shag Nigella.
But when you’ve come this far, there’s no turning back.
I portioned out two cups of batter and folded in white chocolate chips. Unless I burn the shit out of this cake there is no way it could taste bad. I stuffed all that batter into the pan. Then I returned to the rest of the batter.
Now I had to fold in egg yolks, cocoa, chocolate pudding mix and the rest of the milk and made this very thick, very rich batter and to that I added chocolate chips.
You could bail out Wall Street six times over with this shit.
The chocolate layer got plastered on top of the vanilla layer and then the magic cake pan went into the oven for an hour.
When I took it out and the toothpicks came out clean, I had to wait for 10 minutes for it to cool before I could see if it would fall out the pan in one perfect piece.
The 10 longest minutes of my week. And it’s been a long, long week.
Wait, wait, wait.
La. La. La.
And all this baking and waiting was helping to take my mind off the fact that my in-laws arrive tomorrow. Which will mean five or six long days of holding my breath waiting for my mother-in-law to say something evil to me. Ah, holiday fun.
So the timer finally went off and I rushed over to the cake, inverted it onto a plate, flipped it over and, VIOLA, seven of eight trees came out with perfect tops. The other one was a bit crumbly, no doubt because I didn’t get batter all the way down into the pan.
This cake is almost as beautiful as Nigella.
When it cooled, I sprinkled on powdered sugar snow and it’s a thing to behold. It looks like a happy winter wonderland of calories.
Last night we sliced into it and…well let’s just say there was “O” faces all around. This is maybe the best cake EVER. Even my MIL couldn’t say anything snarky about it.
This is why I love Christmas. Making something wonderful and beautiful that everyone likes and shares.
That was the sappiest paragraph I have ever written. And every word is true.
Merry Christmas, y’all!
