Orange Cardamom Bundt

Today has been a food/laundry/organizing frenzy. And I’m not even the one making Thanksgiving dinner! So for those of you who are responsible for the big holiday feast – I commend you. I’ll be traveling home to Minnesota to be with family and eat all my mom’s wonderful food. I am in charge of making bread this year though, I’m pretty excited to share my challah with family.

I think I’ll bring some of today’s recipe home to share, along with other goodies. I got (and then adapted) the recipe from Ann Arbor Cooks. I recently started volunteering there and it has been a lot of fun. I get to learn from the professional chefs, do some dishes and then I get to taste all the food, plus once you volunteer for three classes you get to take a class for half price, it’s quite a deal. You can find info about volunteering on their website.

This recipe was a part of the “classic cakes” class I volunteered in. In class they used sour cream, but I never have that on hand, and I didn’t want to buy it because I would never use the left overs, so I used buttermilk and a little extra butter. Combinations of yogurt, buttermilk, butter and sour cream can frequently be used in baking to replace eachother. Check out this little cheat sheet, you can use a mixture of things you have on hand instead of taking a second trip to the grocery store.

Orange Cardamom Bundt
cake
3 cups AP flour
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
3/4 tsp ground cardamom
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
Zest from half an orange
1 tsp vanilla
3 eggs
1 1/4 cup buttermilk

filling
1/2 cup brown sugar
Zest from other half of the orange
1/2 tsp ground cardamom
1 tsp cinnamon

glaze
Juice from 1 orange
1 1/2 – 2 cups powdered sugar

For recipes with many components like this one, I always like to do a mise en place. A mise en place (literally: “putting in place”) is just a set up of all the ingredients you will need for a recipe, measured out and combined when necessary. I should always do a mise en place, but I don’t, and that’s how it goes.

So for this mise en place I:
Combined the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and cardamom
Combined and whisked the buttermilk and eggs
Combined the butter, sugars, zest and vanilla in the mixing bowl
And combined the filling ingredients

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees!
Then beat the butter, sugars, zest and vanilla on medium speed with a paddle attachment until fluffy.

Now alternate adding in a little bit of buttermilk/egg mixture with a little bit of flour mixture until completely incorporated and smooth.

Spray your favorite bundt pan with cooking spray and put half the cake batter into the pan. Hit the pan on the table or floor a few times to get the batter into all the grooves and get out all the air bubbles. Then top it with the brown sugar filling.

Add the rest of the batter on top of the filling and smooth it out (you can hit the pan on the floor more now if that was fun for you).

Put it in the oven to bake for 50-60 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Wait for the pan and the cake to completely cool before inverting. I cheated a little by putting the whole pan in the fridge for 30 minutes. During cooling time, make your glaze by whisking together the orange juice and powdered sugar.

Then invert the cake onto a plate and drip the glaze all down the sides. Yummm.

Lazy kitties love cardamom…