For November 5

This week, we are taking a break from cookies and spending a week with their friends, the cakes. Two very different types of cakes, in fact:

All-In-One Holiday Bundt Cake, from Dorie Greenspan, Baking: From My Home To Yours
Visitandines de Lorraine, Little "Visitation" Cakes from Lorraine, from Nick Malgieri

I believe I made the Bundt cake last year. It is chockablock full of stuff - pumpkin puree, diced apples, chopped fresh cranberries, chopped pecans, and loads of spices - with a maple icing. One of the reasons I made cakes this week was to try to cut down on the sheer labor involved, but my plan went awry - this cake has quite a bit of prep involved, and with Andrew working I did it all myself. It called for 2 cups of fresh cranberries, "sliced in half or coarsely chopped." Well, I don't know if you have ever worked with fresh cranberries, but those suckers really know how to roll! Anyway, the coarse chopping was not an option, so I ended up individually cutting each cranberry in half. I guess it is good practice - I saw my brain wandering around and developing a LOT of opinions during this process! Anyway, the cake seems quite good - it has so much moisture from the pumpkin puree that I am concerned it is undercooked, but as Andrew corrected me this morning, that just means it is "moist." Right, moist.

In contrast to the big Bundt cake, the other cakes are small and delicate, as you can expect for a recipe invented by nuns in France. Nick Malgieri has a funny history about these on his blog (click on the link to go there). This is a recipe that he has adapted from two old French cookbooks based on a small cake originally made by the Nuns of the Visitation in Lorraine. For some reason I was taken by the recipe (well, it is a cake and involves almonds, which probably explains it) so voila! as they say in France. The recipe includes a small amount (3T) of dark rum, so I am a bit nervous about how they will go over at the Center - they bake for quite a while at 375 degrees, so I am sure the alcohol bakes off, but there is an interesting flavor that the rum imparts.