Month 10 day 19: Peekaboo Bundt Cake

Today I made:
Meyer Lemon-Cranberry Bundt Cake, Food Network Magazine November 2009

I decided to make this cake to bring to our Thanksgiving dinner with a friend and her family. G also baked! He wanted to bring his favorite cookies-- S'more cookies. I made these once and he became obsessed with them, asking for them any time I have occasion to bake cookies. I couldn't care less about these, but the people we shared them with seemed to side with G. Someday he'll make them for our grandchildren like my grandpa makes his famous hand-wrapped caramels!

In the magazine it looked very pretty-- it's a lemon bundt cake, but when you cut it open there is a cranberry filling surprise! I like lemon baked goods quite a bit so I was excited to make this. It contains a ton of ingredients-- almost 4 sticks of butter, 5 eggs, about 3 cups each of flour and sugar, 2 tablespoons of lemon zest, and two teaspoons of vanilla extract (I feel like I've never used more than 1 at once before).

To get the cranberry filling, you fill the bundt pan with about 2/3 of the batter, then put the cranberry sauce in, trying not to touch the sides. Then you cover it up with the rest of the batter. There was a lot of the cranberries though, so I accidentally touched the inside with them. Anyway, it came out of the oven looking like this:

It's bleeding a little :( Oh well, according to the reviews on the website, a lot of people had theirs completely stick to the pan or break open completely at the cranberry part... so better to ruin the surprise a bit than ruin the cake! After it is baked, you stab it a bunch with a skewer (which is really weird, because it does bleed red... when you do it) and then pour lemon syrup over the top (er, bottom... you do this before taking it out of the pan). The next day I glazed it and it mostly covered the exposed cranberry part, so that was good.

It was moist and very lemony. I didn't have Meyer lemons, or orange juice, so I couldn't do the magazine's recommended sub of Meyer juice = mix of lemon and orange juice. For me it's good to be tart, but maybe for others it was too much. We had some light eaters, so even though there were 6 of us and this serves 8-12, we only got through about 1/3 of the cake!