Just another Manic Monday....

When I was little (like age 2-8 maybe) and lived in Germany, my Oma used to make me a Red Wine Cake at least once a week. I LOVED them. They were so good. My mother says it was probably a cake out of a box, like Betty Crocker or Duncan Hines would be in America, but I don't care, it was still awesome. For the longest time I'd had a lot of trouble finding anything close to it as a substitute, until I started looking around online for different recipes.

This morning, I decided to make the Chocolate Bundt Cake. I mostly used one recipe (recipe #1), but borrowed a little info from another one (recipe #2). Links included.

I followed the first recipe almost to the letter. I did use 2% milk instead of 1% (don't know if it really matters). And instead of using just 6 ounces of chocolate to melt, I went ahead and used the full 8 ounces that were in the box. I figured, what's the difference? When it was time to add the liquor, the first recipe didnt actually specify how much to use, so I looked at "recipe #2" and they said they used 1 1/2 cups. My batter was pretty liquidy already, so I just used 1 cup. I bought a Merlot, to use for my cake.

So I think my cake ended up having to cook about 55 minutes. It started to bubble over the top of the pan, and came close to touching the top of my oven, so I hurried up and lowered the rack. Something that I'll probably do at the start of cooking next time instead of in the middle. Things to remember, I guess.

It took FOREVER for this sucker to cool off. The recipe said after 20 minutes of cooling to turn it out of the pan and let it finish cooling on a rack. My cake was not coming out of that pan to save its life. So I let it sit in the pan for about an hour and a half. Even then, I had to get a knife and jiggle it along the sides of the cake, as per someone's suggestion. (Thanks Alka) Didnt come out competely pretty, but I figure I'll be covering it anyway here shortly, so it'll survive. Desi did enjoy eating all the pieces that didn't come out of the pan though. Note to self, grease that pan and flour it better than I did. Apparently what I thought was good enough, was not as good as it could have been.

After I finally got my cake out of the pan, I start to melt another box of chocolate for the topping. Pouring it onto the cake, I realized it doesn't do the pretty "drizzle down the sides" thing unless you pour A LOT in one area. Overall, I still think it came out pretty. After the chocolate drizzle, I put some powdered sugar in my hand and blew it onto the cake. Raspberries would probably be really pretty and tasty on there also. Maybe next time. So all in all, after tasting the cake, I think its just as good, if not better than the cake I had when I was little. Its really moist (haha) and delicious.