I miss bundt cakes. Are you old enough to remember these dessert staples from the 1970s and 80s? My dad had a real sweet tooth when I was growing up, so I baked a lot of cakes and cookies. Bundt cakes were one of the few we always made from mixes, and my favorite was a chocolate cake with coconut center and glaze. You'd put the chocolate cake batter in a bundt pan and layer the coconut filling on top - it would magically sink to the center right where it belonged! Yummmm! A quick internet search tells me that there are lots of bundt cake recipes out there and even an east-coast chain called Nothing Bundt Cake. This is a recipe challenge I do not need to start!
These musings about bundt cakes came to me because today was a bread-baking day. Next up in Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads was Sally Lunn bread, a sweet bread that needed to be baked in a tube pan. I don't have a regular tube pan, but many years ago, in a fit of nostalgia, I bought a scalloped bundt pan. I don't believe I've ever used it for a cake, but I figured it would do for Sally.
According to Clayton, there are disagreements about where the name Sally Lunn bread came from - one references the French for sun and moon and the other an actual woman named Sally Lunn. It doesn't really matter. Suffice it to say that the bread is an unkneaded but twice-risen sweet bread. I'm sure it's delightful, but it just doesn't fulfill my newly developed bundt cake cravings.
The hubs barely let me get it out of the pan before he was ready, knife and cutting board in hand. A couple of slabs covered in butter were soon consumed.
The bread is not overly sweet - it only had 1/3 cup of sugar in it - but warm has a soft, almost gummy texture. It's not underdone; I think it's just the result of sugar and three eggs in the recipe. It is almost cake-like (but still not a coconut chocolate bundt cake). I'll be it would be good with clotted cream and jam, the way scones are eaten in England. I do have raspberry jam....
I titled this post "A Two-Batch Day" because I needed to bake two types of bread. We'd finally used up, just as it began to mold, the last of the English Muffin Bread I made a week ago. Sally Lunn isn't going to meet our needs (wants?) for bread to eat with breakfast in the mornings. I decided to also make the next recipe in Clayton's book, Buttermilk Bread.
The Buttermilk Bread recipe was a more standard bread recipe, although it had the extra leavening power of a whole 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda. Clayton's short section on Yeast and Other Leavenings told me that baking soda, technically a chemical leavening agent, reacts with acids such as buttermilk or sour cream to produce carbon dioxide. He claims this is an almost instantaneous reaction (which I definitely see when I make sourdough pancakes) that requires immediate baking. Apparently it is of lesser importance in this bread since it had two 1-hour risings before baking.
I keep thinking that one of these days I'll decide a recipe is the perfect everyday-bread recipe. I've decided that's not likely to happen. This buttermilk bread is certainly a contender with its light texture and chewy crust, but so were the Thirty-Minute, Cuban, and Egg Harbor breads. Honestly, I'm not sure I could tell you that they were very different, although I might have to do a side-by-side comparison one day.
Oh, dear, I went back to bundt cakes on the internet and found a recipe for a chocolate coconut bundt cake that looks just like the ones I used to make. I haven't made a cake in months and months. We deserve one once in a while, right?
