No More Ugly Cake

Previously, I've chronicled the adventure of making ugly cake as my Christmas tradition. Well, it's not supposed to be ugly cake, it's supposed to be a sour cream coffee cake made with a brown sugar/butter/walnut filling that comes out of a bundt pan.

My mother managed to make said coffee cake for decades. Year after year, she would make several of these beauts, to be enjoyed as a family on Christmas morning while opening presents or to be given to friends and family as a Christmas present.

As for me, year after year I attempted to copy her same recipe, but with very different results, as you can see:

The 2008 ugly cake.



The 2009 ugly cake.

I can never manage to get the cake out of the bundt pan in one piece. Each year led to an interrogation from my mom: Did I use Crisco and not butter? Had I floured the pan? Did I make sure that the sides of the coffee cake pulled away from the sides before trying to extract it from the pan? It seemed that this was a delicate process that I would never master.

And then, there is this year's attempt:

Beautiful, isn't it? Fully intact with no filling sticking out of the top or the edge, making the cake stick inside the pan.

The girls were amazed. They couldn't believe their eyes. And they were slightly disappointed. After all, unless the cake crumbles out of the pan, there are no crumbs or little pinches of filling to eat. Guess they will just have to wait until Christmas morning to see if it tastes as good as it looks.