Taste Odyssey #8 - Milk Chocolate Chip Graham Cracker Bundt

This recipe comes courtesy of the fantastic book "Piece of Cake!" which is full of delicious recipes like this for pretty much every occasion.  I won't be reproducing their recipes every time, but I figured they wouldn't kill me to just list this one since the cake it made was fabulous and really sells the whole book in my opinion.

Prep work:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit
2. Make sure you have a 10-inch Bundt pan, sprayed with nonstick baking spray and then floured

Ingredients:

• 2 cups graham cracker crumbs
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup packed light brown sugar

• 1/3 cup granulated sugar
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3 large eggs (room temperature)
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 and 1/2 cups milk chocolate chips

Process:

1. Whisk together graham cracker crumbs, flour, brown sugar, granulated sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt.

2. Add eggs, buttermilk, butter and vanilla to flour mixture, beat for 1 minute with an electric mixer until blended.  Scrape sides and bottom of bowl with a spatula.  Beat on high speed for 2 minutes.  Gently stir in chocolate chips.

3. Spread batter evenly in pan.
4. Bake for 45 minutes.  Cool in pan on a wire rack for 10 minutes, then invert onto rack and cool completely.

Thoughts:

One bowl, no waiting.  I love this book to bits, and simple recipes like this are pretty much the reason why.  This cake is delicious.  It's milk chocolate chips instead of semi-sweet and the graham crackers set it off nicely, or some equally important food-person speak.  It just tastes good, dammit!  There's nothing in it that requires any grand skill or forethought beyond paying attention, but the results speak for themselves. 

My one tip is to really heed the scraping the sides and bottom part.  Once the batter starts getting mixed some of the powdery stuff likes to settle to the bottom and won't make it out without a little encouragement.

This was my first recipe that really got me into using a mixer.  Previously I'd been doing everything by hand.  This time I used our hand mixer and got very impressive results.  On the one hand, doing it all by hand is cool.  On the other, it's bloody stupid and the batter gets much more evenly mixed with the mixer.

I do notice for Bundt cakes that they tend to come out very dry on the outside, due to the nature of the pan.  This worried me at first, but it's just how they roll.  The inside was soft and moist and so, so good.

No major food warnings on this one either.  Buttermilk was really the only thing I hadn't had experience with but it was not an issue at all, thankfully.  Just bake and enjoy!  Next time we'll be back with my Thanksgiving project, which is two recipes and pretty much a caloric slab.