TWD—Milk Chocolate Mini Bundt Cakes

Whoa, this week flew by!  At about 2:00 Monday afternoon it dawned on me that I hadn’t even thought about TWD for this week!  We’ve been super busy as we’re dejunking our house and doing everything we can to get it ready to sell.  (I’ve mentioned this to a few already, but can I just say, there’s a new love in my life—Mr. Clean!  Bahhh, I love him, well, I love the Magic Eraser, that thing is awesome.  I’ve scrubbed off a lot of stickers, markers, ink, crayons, scuff marks and gunk with these things.  They work so well!

Okay, I think the chocolate ganache looks like spider legs.  I need a lesson or two in drizzling down the sides of a bundt better.  Part of the issue is probably that I use a piping bag to make it easier, but it makes it look too stringy or leggy.  I’ll work on that. 

Anyway, I decided to hurry up and make the bundt cakes.  They were pretty simple.  Just made a quick cake batter, with milk chocolate, butter, sugar, egg, milk, the usual cake ingredients.  Dorie suggested  a swirl in the middle of the cakes made of walnuts or pecans, cocoa powder and sugar.  This is where you must know I veered from the recipe.  Hey, Dorie suggested we play around.  I played.  And I kind of had to hurry.  And I ended up taking some not-so-great pictures.  But the point is that I made this week’s recipe.  The cake was okay.  I hate to say it, but the ganache I made was the best part.  The cake was a little dry and I only baked these for 15 minutes.  This recipe made 11 mini bundts for me, so I must have some really tiny bundts.  Dorie didn’t suggest a size, just that the recipe would make six.  Hey, biggest trick ever, I put the batter in a plastic, zip top baggie and snipped off a little corner so I could easily get the batter in the pans.  Totally rocked rather than trying to spoon it in around the center of each bundt!  (I smoothed out the top of each.)

I chopped up a couple Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and put those in the middle of two cakes.  Then I chopped up some pecans and toffee bits (gotta get those in there!) and I put those in two cakes.  I did a couple cakes with chopped up Rolo candies for the caramel effect and I did a few with just some mini chocolate chips sprinkle in and a few plain ones.  The ones I was most excited to try were the pecan/toffee ones and guess what, those two stuck to the pan.  Sigh.  Oh well.  The rest of them popped right out after a good spray with cooking spray so they’d release after baking.

We ate these Monday night for a Family Home Evening treat.  The boys certainly seemed to love them.  I tried to get pictures of each, but of course, Scott and Taylor wouldn’t play along.  Never fear, Parker hammed it up for the camera!

Here’s Parker with his bummed look because he wanted one of the cakes with the Reese cups and I gave him the wrong one.  He ate the one with Rolo Caramels, then got to have the peanut butter one.  He decided he wanted more peanut butter, so he put “a little” on top.  Scott ate two also.

It’s pretty hard to get Parker to just make a normal face.  He FINALLY lost one of his front teeth this past weekend (he’s 8!).  The dentist told him six months ago that if those two teeth don’t come out by his next check up (Feb. 17!), she’ll pull them for him.  He DOES not want that to happen!  The other one is just slightly loose.

Hey, while we’re on the subject of Parker, he had his Pinewood Derby for Cub Scouts this weekend.

Parker loves Scouts.  He always puts his shirt on at least an hour before Scouts every week.  He was excited for the Pinewood Derby.

Car number 28, dubbed by me as The Crayola Car, took 2nd place!  Go Parker, Go Crayola!  (Keep in mind, we do Scouts with our church group, so while it is still part of the Boy Scouts of America, it’s a much smaller group.  So Parker won against 9 cars and the race on a really old, rickety wooden track.  Still, he’s pretty happy about 2nd place.)

Ok, back to the bundt cakes!  Here’s Sam with his cake.

So there you have it.  I tried taking pictures of Scott’s choice, the Rolo cake, then Taylor’s cake, “the plain” one, but the batteries in the camera were dying and apparently the pictures didn’t take.  Sigh.  Already put in new batteries.  Who cares, I know.

You can find the recipe for these milk chocolate mini bundt cakes at Kristin’s blog, I'm Right About Everything.  She chose our recipe this week.  You can also check out the other blogger’s cakes at the Tuesday's With Dorie blog  as well.  Toodles, gotta get back to Mr. Clean and scrub, scrub, scrub!