My first bundt cake

November 15th is supposed to be national bundt day (which nation? some far away nation, hmm that is not the point). I didn't know what a bundt cake was 2 months back, so I don't expect you to know either, but if you knew what a bundt cake is, you are way cooler than me. So here is Wikipedia coming for our help - Bundt Cake (finally I paid up, couldn't handle the guilt any more :) ). I came across this information about bundt day from the food librarian whose blog I keep visiting very regularly. I love the pictures which she puts up there and also the recipes. After reading about the national bundt day, I decided it is the perfect time to use the bundt baking pan which I have picked up 2 months back while on a shopping spree for baking stuff.

When we wanted to make a cheese cake for the cooking-together-saturday, Lisa asked Shyam to pick up some cream cheese. The recipe called for 500g of cream cheese and Shyam picked up 1000 rupees worth of cream cheese. Since Lisa thought it is criminal to use 1000 rupees worth of cream cheese in one go, she halved all the ingredients and made the cake. That means I am left with the rest of the cream cheese in my fridge and I wanted to use that too in the bundt day baking. So I ended up with this Martha Stewart's recipe for a pound cake which I decided to bake in my bundt pan.

If you notice there is no baking powder in the recipe which caused slight hesitation. Then we decided to follow the recipe anyway. I didn't expect the cake to rise since there was no baking powder, but then it started rising and there appeared some cracks on top of the cake. Then when I checked back on the Martha Stewart page I found the picture out there also has a cake with a crack. But when I wanted to take a picture we decided to make some icing to cover up the crack, so there went some more of the cream cheese and some sugar.

Obviously if I want to post the blog for the bundt day, I need pictures. Then I realised when I have something delicious sitting in front of me I don't have the patience to take 350 pictures to select the best out of it. 5 pictures and the cake was inside my mouth. It turned out really rich (all that cream cheese) and moist, dense and real yummm. Only there was a slight buttery after taste, reason for which I need to figure out and fix next time.

Next day morning I decided to take some pictures of the cake in the garden. While out I saw many butterflies around. Then I became ambitious, I wanted the picture of the cake with a butterfly in the background. It was a wait for sometime before I managed to do that and I realised that I needed a larger depth of field to get both visible. But before the butterfly flew away, I managed to change the focus and got that in another frame, but I forgot to turn the cake around. Next time I will do a better job, promise :)

Common Grass yellow with my cream cheese cake