All Cakes Considered - Melissa Gray [32]
7. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 30 minutes, or until a toothpick or thin knife inserted in the middle comes out clean. While the cake is baking, stew the peaches.
TO MAKE THE STEWED PEACHES
8. Bring the peaches, sugar, and water to a boil in a medium saucepan over medium heat, stirring gently until the sugar dissolves.
9. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 10 minutes.
TO SERVE
10. Cool the bread in the pan for 10 minutes, then unmold onto a serving plate and serve warm with the stewed peaches. This can be tricky in the office. I usually wrap the bread in parchment paper and aluminum foil. At work I remove the foil, wrap the cake with dampened paper towels, and microwave at low power to warm it up. If you can’t do that, don’t worry: it’s good cool, too. You can serve the peaches hot, cold, or at room temperature, depending on your fancy (I like them a little cooler than the cake, but they’re good hot, too).
Another great find for me has been Southern Living magazine’s annual recipe books. They’re a little skimpy on the cake recipes, but the ones they do have are something good. This recipe (pictured on page 40), from the 2005 edition, doesn’t require a lot of beating, so you can go lowtech and mix it by hand.
Cocoa bread was a welcome change when my co-workers were getting a little sick of gingerbread. But here’s the thing: If you bring it to work, you have to bring the stewed peaches in a separate container, and leave directions next to the cocoa bread. Otherwise, instead of eating the bread and peaches together, they’ll eat each of them alone. Double the recipe if you want more than 8 servings.
Chapter Two
Bring Me Bundts And Bring Me More Spice And Vice!
HOW TO BAKE A DROP-DEAD GORGEOUS CAKE WITH HARDLY ANY EFFORT. PLUS SPICE, FRUIT, AND DRUNKEN CAKES—SO VERY, VERY NICE!
Gimme Them Purdy Cakes!
A brief history of the Bundt pan
Here’s the thing about a good Bundt pan:
It can turn the most pedestrian of cakes into a real glamour-puss. That brown sugar cake back on page 42? It looks all homey-Americana when done in a regular ol’ tube pan. But when I pour that batter into my Nordic Ware Bavaria Bundt Pan then bake, cool, and dust with confectioners’ sugar, wunderbar, baby! It’s GORGEOUS!
I say wunderbar instead of voilà because the Bundt pan has Germanic roots. Over in Deutschland, it’s known as a kugelhopf, because that’s what they use to bake kugelhopf, a breadlike cake with seedless raisins. Kugelhopf literally means “risen ball”, which tells of its doughy, yeasty origins.
Kugelhopf pans are circular, deep, and fluted. They were traditionally made from enameled pottery or heavy cast iron, which means you’d need a pair of Popeye arms to even use one. That changed in 1950, when H. David Dalquist responded to a friend’s request. He was the founder of Nordic Ware Corporation. She was president of the Minneapolis chapter of the Hadassah Society. The members of this Jewish women’s organization wanted to make kugelhopf, which is also known as bundkuchen, meaning “a gathering cake.” They needed nice pans that were easy to use. Dalquist modified some existing Scandinavian designs to create a new pan out of lightweight aluminum. To distinguish his creation from the Bund, a proHitler German-American group from the 1930s, Dalquist added the letter “t” to “bund”, and voilà! or wunderbar! or ta-dah! The Bundt pan was born! Dalquist also pioneered the glass carousel that rotates in microwaves, but that’s another story.
The year 1966 was when the Bundt pan really took off, thanks to the ingenuity of one Ella Rita Helfrich. The Houston, Texas, housewife won second prize in the Pillsbury Bake-Off Contest that year with a cake EVERYBODY simply HAD to try: Tunnel of Fudge Cake. And they had to have a Bundt pan to try it in. And yes, you’re going to get your shot at it, too, but let me finish my story.
If you visit Minnesota, you can tour the Nordic Ware factory and you might be able to get a discounted