Nonnie’s Blueberry Buckle

This blueberry cake is awesome! It’s like an an oversized, very moist blueberry muffin.  It seems like a ridiculous amount of blueberries when you are adding them to the cake batter, but the result is wonderful. So many blueberries!I’ve never used a tube pan for this kind of cake, so I was a little skeptical about how it would turn out. The result was awesome, but getting it out of the pan was challenging. It says to let cool for twenty minutes, at which point the pan is still quite hot, and then to run a knife along the edges to loosen, and attempt to remove the sides and the bottom. I ended up doing a bit of cake acrobatics, where I lifted the tube out, then carefully ran a knife under the bottom, flipped the whole thing onto a plate, then flipped it again onto a wire rack to cool.  It all came out beautifully though, after all that juggling of hot cake.

I would definitely make this again. Next time I plan on adding more lemon, and some nuts, but otherwise it’s a fabulous cake. 

St. Pat’s Drunk Cake

The St. Pat’s Drunk Cake from Baked Occasions is described as a Chocolate Stout Bundt Cake with Whiskey Bailey’s Glaze. I was pretty excited to try it!  I think dark chocolate and dark beer is a dynamite combination.  I used Innis and Gunn’s Irish Whiskey Stout, which has a molasses flavor, and tastes a lot more like whiskey than you would expect from a beer, even one with the word ‘whiskey’ in the name. I think a basic Guinness would work better, and is undoubtedly more widely available.   The cake came out well, it was very dense, rich and chocolatey without being overly sweet.  It didn’t have a pronounced stout flavor. I think the beer just blended in to enhance the chocolate. However I didn’t feel like the frosting fit the cake very well. Mixing cream cheese and boozy flavor was just odd. And the frosting I made wasn’t particularly attractive, too thin to spread but too creamy to pour.  I think having a simply powdered sugar glaze would have worked well, and skip the cream cheese altogether. Drizzle a bit of melted chocolate on top of that would be perfect.