{TWD} Milk Chocolate Mini-ish Bundt-ish Cake

You've probably heard the saying that "close only counts in horseshoes." No matter how much wisdom might be contained in those words we can add something else to the list: Dorie Greenspan's Milk Chocolate Mini Bundt Cakes. I stayed close on this week's Tuesday's With Dorie assignment: close to a bundt, close to the specific mini-size, and close to the ingredients, and ended up with a cake that definitely counted as a winner!

n.o.e.'s notes:

- You can find the recipe for these mini-cakes by clicking over to Kristin's post on her blog I’m Right About Everything (can you think of a better name for a blog?) or you can find it on pages 188-189 of Dorie Greenspan's book, Baking: From My Home to Yours.

- The recipe is written to be baked in a specialized mini-bundt pan, which resembles a large muffin pan, but with six little bundt-shaped indentations for 1 cup of batter each. I own my fair share of specialty pans, and have doubled or tripled my collection of baking pans since joining Tuesdays With Dorie back in 2008. But alas, that is one pan that I do not own, and I drew the line at purchasing it for this recipe. Instead, I used turned to some mini-angel food cake pans that I'd purchased on impulse and never used to date. My pans were larger than the mini bundts that Dorie contemplated but I decided the size and shape were close enough.

- I also drew the line at baking a partial recipe, since I was still busy fobbing off Cocoa-Nana Loaf onto unsuspecting relatives at the time I baked this next chocolate cake. As it turned out 1/3 recipe fit perfectly into one of my 1.5 cup mini-angel food cake pans.


- Early reports about this cake tended to contain the word "dry" which is never a good thing for a chocolate cake. To ensure that my cake was nice and moist, I replaced half the butter with oil and added generous dollop of full fat plain yogurt (1 T for my 1/3 recipe). Very close, wouldn't you say?

- The streusel-like swirl sounded delicious in this cake, and I thought adding cocoa nibs to the nut filling (pecan in my case) would taste even better. I also used dark cocoa powder to dust the nuts and nibs. Close, but just a bit crunchier, and chocolaty-er.

- One thing I've learned about putting a swirl layer in the middle of a cake is to stop the swirl before getting to the edges of the pan, if possible, which helps the cake to hold together when it is unmolded. The mini-ish pan that I was using had a removable bottom, which made it easy for the cake to release from the pan.

- I didn't want to make the (optional) glaze for such a small cake, and was going to dust the top with powdered sugar and heap it with whipped cream, but I found some random gananche in the fridge/freezer, which I warmed, thinned with cream, and dripped over the cake. Pretty close to the feel of the original glaze, in my opinion. I sprinkled some cocoa nibs over everything.

- The cake got even more compact and moist with a day or two in the fridge.


the verdict:

This was a lovely, dense, mild chocolate cake. I loved the crunch and the chocolate kick from the swirl of cocoa nibs and nuts. The ganache provided a nice interplay of dark chocolate to balance the milk chocolate in the cake and the unsweetened cocoa nibs. The next day the cake was like a mild chocolate pound cake with frosting. A glass of milk was the perfect complement to the flavors of the cake. My "close" cake counted as a winner here!