Happy Birthday, jonesing for… !

One year ago today I started my blog and it’s been nothing but fun since.  This whole thing began after encouragement from friends since I enjoyed taking pictures of whatever I was cooking, and liked typing up a few words about it as well. I’ve had so much fun sharing my love of cooking and recipes, and nothing makes me happier than hearing my friends and total strangers have been inspired to cook from recipes I post.

And I have something even bigger to celebrate than my blog’s anniversary. I’m so excited to announce I’ve just accepted a position as the new Test Kitchen Assistant for a national food magazine! I’ll be testing recipes, assisting food styling, grocery shopping, and working in the test kitchen for a living – a.k.a. my dream job! Words cannot express how excited and blessed I feel to be able to do what I love for a living as young as I am. Getting out from behind a desk and back into the kitchen means the world to me, so now it’s really time to celebrate!

So to celebrate, I wanted to bake a cake – a very special cake. In a way, this entire post, blog, and really my career, is dedicated to my oldest sister, DeAnna. She honestly is the biggest reason I pursued cooking – admiring her life as a pastry chef when she was younger and always being enchanted with whatever she was baking or making. This bundt cake is one of the earliest food memories I have of being impressed with food, thinking the black and white drizzle was so fancy, the cake shape so odd, the entire thing just being special. So I wanted to go back to my roots with this one.

Unfortunately neither D nor my mom could find the recipe. They both tore their kitchens apart looking for it to no avail, which seemed almost poetic in a way. I got to just create my own version, which is exactly what I like to do here. So I took a simple chocolate bundt cake recipe and oomphed it up, adding coffee and buttermilk, using a chocolate ganache drizzle instead of melted semi-sweet chips, and I had to stay true to the white chocolate drizzle – even though I’m not a huge fan, you can’t get that stunning white color with anything else, and since the cake isn’t overly sweet, it balances out.

So thank you to my readers, family, and friends for a wonderful year! I can’t wait to see what this next year has in store!

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Black and White Bundt Cake

Makes at least 16 servings (depending on how you slice it).

Based on my sister’s recipe with froufrou flourish from Food & Wine.

Ingredients

• 5 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped and separated (I really indulged and used Callebaut “Refined” semi-sweet, which is to die for)
• ¾ cup canola oil
• 1¼ cups granulated sugar
• 1 extra-large egg plus 1 egg white
• 2 cups plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• ½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1¼ teaspoons baking soda
• ¾ teaspoon salt
• 1 cup strongly brewed fresh coffee, cooled (the bolder the better)
• 1 cup reduced fat buttermilk
• 1/3 cup heavy cream
• ½ tablespoon corn syrup
• ½ tablespoon unsalted butter
• 4 ounces white chocolate (I usually loathe white chocolate but Callebaut’s white is actually nice and mild and not too sweet, so I recommend it)

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 365° F. Spray a 12-cup Bundt pan with vegetable oil spray and set aside.
2. In a small saucepan or your microwave, melt 2 ounces of the chopped chocolate over low heat, stirring constantly. Pour the chocolate into a medium bowl and let cool until there’s no longer steam rising from it. Whisk in the oil and sugar until smooth, then whisk in the egg and egg white.
3. In a small bowl, whisk the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt. Add half of the dry ingredients to the chocolate mixture along with ½ cup of the coffee and ½ cup of the buttermilk; whisk until smooth. Add the remaining dry ingredients, coffee and buttermilk and whisk until smooth.
4. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake in the lower third of the oven for about 35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out with a few moist crumbs attached. Let the cake cool on a rack for 10 minutes, then turn it out and let cool completely.
5. While the cake cools, prepare the ganache. In a small saucepan, bring the cream to a simmer, but don’t scald it. In a heatproof bowl, combine the remaining 3 ounces of chopped chocolate with the corn syrup and butter. Pour the hot cream over the chocolate and let stand until melted, about 5 minutes. Whisk until smooth. Let the ganache glaze cool until thick but still pourable, about 5 minutes (don’t be afraid to pop it in the fridge for a few minutes if your kitchen is slightly warm).
6. Drizzle the ganache over the cooled cake. Let the cake stand until the glaze is set, at least 30 minutes, before adding the white drizzle.
7. In a double boiler, melt the white chocolate until smooth and glossy. I do not recommend doing this in the microwave because white chocolate burns very easily and doesn’t melt like real chocolate (because it isn’t)! Drizzle over the cake artfully and serve slices with a huge glass of cold milk (and maybe a glass of champagne!).

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