Bundt #5 - Streusel with a Glaze Fix

I was home in South Dakota visiting my folks this week, and before I headed home my mom asked if I could possibly make a Bundt cake for us to have, since I've been talking about them so much. Never quite sure what you'll find in someone else's kitchen (though I do know where everything is in Mom's kitchen), I decided to hedge my Bundt bets and take home a mix. 

The folks at Nordic Ware actually make a whole line of Bundt cake mixes, and so I took home a Cinnamon Streusel Cake mix, which has this recipe on the back:

There's a lot fewer ingredients to get together for this, which was nice:

You can tell I'm in my mom's kitchen due to the different utensils - and the Indonesian Batik table cloth.

I decided that it made sense to use a caramelized sugar crust on a this cake, so I buttered and sugared the pan, and added a dash of cinnamon just because.

I realize that you don't really need to see me making a boxed cake, but I took the following picture because my folks get their eggs from a local farm, and the yolks are so much more yellow than the ones I would usually get from the grocery store in Minneapolis.

So... 3/4 of the batter goes into the pan, and then you add the streusel to the remaining batter...

Then that goes into the pan...

And you swirl...

And then you bake it, and take it out of the oven to let it cool for 10 minutes before flipping it out...

Which, if you're in your own kitchen, you instinctively do on the prep table over by the window, where it's much cooler. In your mom's kitchen, though - when the baking cabinet counter is covered with other things and you weren't able to find the cooling racks before taking it out so you don't want to set it on the table or the top of the dishwasher - you simply set it on top of the stove. Which seems like a fine idea, because the stove is cool. Except that you forget that this is a glass-top stove which retains heat much longer than the gas range you have at home.

So you wait your 10 minutes, and you see that the "bottom" edge of the cake has caramelized and is beginning to pull away from the pan, and you think "Perfect! Time to put a (now-found) cooling rack on top of it, try not to burn your fingers, and flip it out.

But, when you flip it, it feels wrong. There's not that satisfying "whump" of the cake coming out of the pan and landing on the rack. There are two options at this point: flip it back the other way, hope that it all stayed in the pan, and wait another 10 minutes; or lift the pan up and see what happens.

Guess which one I did...

Had this been a "normal" cake, I'd have probably just broken it up and made a trifle out of it. But I wasn't sure how a cinnamon streusel Bundt trifle would have turned out, so I went on an excavation adventure and eventually dug all of the cake out of the pan to form it into some semblance of a cake. At which point I decided that some glaze was necessary.

It looks a bit more like a "coffee cake" than a Bundt cake - but at least it's still a ring.

Was it pretty? God no.

Did it taste good? Well... After having it for dessert on Wednesday night, I also had it for breakfast on Thursday... and lunch...


Have you had your own kitchen disaster, and you're not sure whether it was the recipe or user error? Send me the recipe and I'll try it out and let you know what I find!