Bourbon Chocolate Bundt Cake

Today is National Bundt Day. November 15th was first designated as such 5 years ago by Nordic Ware, a U.S.-based kitchenware company best know for their Bundt ™ pan. For the past 3 years Mary, The Food Librarian, has celebrated by making 30 bundts in the 30 days leading up to National Bundt Day. It's an impressive feat and I am amazed by how many different bundt-shaped pans she owns. It's quite a collection!

She asked her readers to join the fun by making a bundt of our very own. I decided to booze it up and make a bourbon-soaked chocolate bundt cake using a recipe I found in the New York Times. The recipe calls for 1 cup (250 ml) of bourbon or any other whiskey. That seems like a lot of alcohol and you can definitely taste it, but I don't think it's too much. I'm not at all a drinker and I thought it was the perfect amount of bourbon to go with the dark chocolate cake.



And what makes bourbon even better? Luxardo cherries of course! I jazzed up the cake up by drizzling it with a Luxardo cherry glaze. This cake is not quite breakfast food. Some people at the office were still drunk at lunch time. I'm only slightly kidding. :)

Berry and Cream Cookies

I guess I've been in a Christina Tosi mood lately. She's the pastry chef at Momofuku's Milk Bar in New York City and her Milk Bar cook book was just released in late October. I made Milk Bar's amazing crack pie recently (using the LA Times' version of her recipe not the recipe in the Milk Bar book which is slightly different) and her kitchen sink cookie, the compost cookie, remains one of my favorite go-to recipes. Then I saw Christina Tosi's blueberry and cream cookie recipe on Martha Stewart's site and I had to bake some right away. (BTW, the blueberry and cream cookie recipe in the Milk Bar book is different from the Martha Stewart one I used here.)

Tosi was inspired to make a cookie that tasted like a blueberry muffin and I have to agree that the dried blueberry version really does taste like the top of a blueberry muffin. The muffin top is the best part of the muffin, don’t you think? I think it's the addition of the milk crumbs. Even though the extra step of making the milk crumb streusel seems fussy, I think it's really the key to making this cookie taste like a muffin.



I've made these cookies using only dried blueberries and another batch using a mix of dried blueberries, cherries and strawberries. All photos in this post are from the mixed berry batch.



Instead of making 14 very large cookies like the recipe states, I usually make about 4 dozen small cookies since I have a lot of mouths to feed. It's all about portion control. I might have assumed that 14 very large cookies would have encouraged people to share since a single cookie is quite large, but they still take one whole cookie. If it's big, they take one. If it's small, they take one or maybe two. Even if they took two cookies there would still be 24 servings instead just 14.

If you have fewer mouths to feed or if you keep company with people who like to share, I recommend making them super large like the recipe states especially if you want cookies that have soft centers and crisp edges. It's hard to get that texture when the cookies are portioned out into 48 small ones. Even so, the small cookies are still really, really good.