The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [194]
As our week of back-of-the-box cooking raced happily on, a new dessert favorite quickly emerged: Milky Way Bar Swirl Cake. A Milky Way bar is the only food I know that is equally delicious frozen, at room temperature, and, as I have now discovered, at 350 degrees. The Milky Way was created in 1923, and it is the best-selling candy bar in the world; everywhere outside the United States it is labeled “Mars Bar,” though everywhere it consists of the same malted-milk nougat topped with a layer of caramel, all dipped in milk chocolate. The Mars company is best known for its M & M’s recipes. When it first printed a recipe for Party Cookies (really Toll House Cookies with M & M’s replacing the semisweet chocolate chips) on the twelve-ounce supermarket package, sales doubled! Less renowned is the eight-page four-color recipe booklet that Mars slipped into its six-pack of full-size Milky Ways in 1986. I have obtained a copy.
The main attraction is Milky Way Bar Swirl Cake, a delicious yellow Bundt cake made from a commercial mix with two Milky Ways swirled inside and another two melted and dripped over the top, where they magically harden into a glossy glaze. The only problem we encountered in making the Swirl Cake was another flagrant case of furtive downsizing. The recipe calls for four 2.23-ounce bars. Milky Ways now on the market weigh 2.15 ounces, a shrinkage of 3.6 percent. Obsessive recipe followers will buy an extra bar, as I did, slice off one-seventh of it, and eat the rest either frozen or at room temperature.
I cannot count the number of boxes of Domino light brown sugar I rotated last week on supermarket shelves in search of the simple and delicious recipe I remember for Butterscotch Nut Ice Cream. Neither of my back-of-the-box anthologies seems to have heard of it. A call to Domino exposed my recollection as only partially correct. A recipe did appear for a brief period, but unlike my adaptation of it, the original employed an ice-cube tray instead of an ice-cream freezer and required the annoying use of a double boiler. When I described my variation to the lady at Domino, she offered to have it reformulated and tested by one of their home economists, which I thought would be fun, though I then meddled with their version, in part because it did not contain enough pecans. I tell you all this so that you can blame me if it does not please you. But it surely will.
Milky Way Bar Swirl Cake (adapted)
4 Milky Way bars (2.23 ounces each), sliced
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons water
1 package (18½ ounces) pudding-in-the-mix yellow cake mix
⅓ cup (5 tablespoons) melted butter, cooled
3 eggs, at room temperature
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
Confectioners’ sugar
2 tablespoons butter, for the glaze
Stir the slices from two Milky Ways with 2 tablespoons of water in a medium saucepan over medium heat until smooth, and remove from the heat. Meanwhile, generously butter and flour a 12-cup Bundt pan. Using an electric mixer, prepare the cake batter with the ⅓ cup melted butter (even if the package specifies oil), 3 eggs, and 1 cup of water. Scoop out ⅔ cup of the cake batter and stir it, along with the flour, into the melted Milky Ways. Pour the rest of the cake batter into the Bundt pan, and spoon the Milky Way mixture in a ring on the center of the batter, avoiding the sides of the pan. Swirl the batters together with a knife. Bake at 350° F. for 40 minutes and let cool in the pan on a rack for 25 minutes. Invert and unmold the cake and sprinkle lightly with confectioners’ sugar.
While the cake is cooling, wipe