TWD: Milk Chocolate Mini Cakes

Happy Groundhog Day! It's snowing outside of my window as I'm writing this post, and this morning Punxsutawny Phil saw his shadow. You know what that means, right? My thin-blooded Texan self is in for another 6 weeks of winter. I want warmer weather so badly I feel sort of like a junkie right now. I need some serious heat and sunshine in my life. In the meantime, I think that the heat around here is going to come from my oven because one thing that cold weather is good for is baking!

Baking is always fun, but it's great in the winter when the house is already cold and you don't have to worry about excessive kitchen heat. To help direct my baking fix, this week's TWD is milk chocolate mini bundt cakes. Now, I have a lot of kitchen gear devoted to minis because when you're a singleton, mini is often the name of the game. I do not, however, have mini bunt pans so I made mine in muffin tins. I thought that the cake batter was reasonably easy to mix together, but I did notice that it was very, very stiff and heavy (I'll attribute that to the 7 oz of melted milk chocolate in the batter). I left out the swirl because it just didn't appeal to me, and I added mini chocolate chips instead. I got 10 muffin size cakes out of this recipe, but I could easily have gotten 11 or 12 -- my cakes rose very high and nearly overflowed! These little cakes were delicate, and about 3 of them broke as I flipped them out. I was kind of concerned about making this recipe in muffin tins simply because it doesn't have the hole in the center and I wasn't sure how that would work out as far as cooking all the way through. I did have to bake my cakes about 10 minutes longer, but other than that the transition was seriously easy. 

Now, let's talk about the glaze. Or should I say chocolate tar? This was some serious tar -- I accidentally got some on my pants and I really feel like I need a can of WD-40 to get it out. I used high quality bittersweet chocolate. It was melted and smooth and I added the corn syrup and, so far, so good. And then, it just got really thick. It didn't exactly seize, but boy howdy, it was so thick. Thick like taffy, so thick that I really had to manipulate my "glaze" to even attempt to have it artfully drip down the sides of my cake. Thick like tar, really. 

 

These are some seriously tasty cakes, even with the chocolate tar on top. I tried to ask Dudley what he thought of the cakes while he was eating one, and I could just tell that the glaze was really impeding his ability to chew, let alone speak. The glaze just sort of stuck to everything in your mouth and it was really difficult to consume. I ended up eating around the glaze, but Dudley seemed to enjoy the whole kit-n-kaboodle. I absolutely loved the cake part -- it was chocolatey and moist and delicious. The milk chocolate that I used is Endangered Species and it has a 52% cocoa content, which I think might be part of the reason that I could really taste the chocolate. Thank you, Kristin, for choosing this recipe! I will definitely make the cakes again. As for the glaze, I'm sure it was user error, but I think next time I might just leave them plain or try ganache. If you'd like the recipe, you can check pgs 188-189 of the book or visit Kristin's blog, I'm Right About Everything.