The Electric Lemonade Bundt

It was National Bundt Cake Day 2019.

I had a dozen lemons from my tree going crazy.

I had a bottle of blue curaçao from that time it was on sale when I was shopping for supplies for the Harvey Wallbanger Bundt.

I had many fond memories of being in my 20s and going to Chili’s and eating burgers that were served with knives sticking out of them and drinking Electric Lemonade like it was water and not being at all disturbed by the fact that Chili’s thought it was a great idea to give patrons both knives and copious amounts of alcohol at the same time.

And I had a vision. A vision of a bright blue lemony cake topped with lemony glaze and candied lemon peel, a cake version of all those happy Chili’s memories.

What I got was this.

I know a few of the things I did wrong with this cake, and am still puzzled by a few others. The interior of the cake was indeed the bright blue I’d envisioned, but you don’t get to see that because I photographed this particular baking endeavor with this weird thing called “a camera” rather than with my phone, and all the photos were inadvertently deleted.

Pro Tip: When you share a studio and shoot with both a flash card and an EyeFi card, make sure it’s very very very understood which exactly you mean when you ask if it’s okay to clear “the chip”.

So the color was there. The flavor was there. The blue curaçao candied lemon peel turned out really well. The glaze was textbook. But somewhere along the way, the texture veered into the place bakers refer to as OhNoThisIsJustSeriouslyFuckingWrongLand, and sadly there are times when you just have to accept that’s where your cake lives now.

Before that acceptance sometimes comes a moment of denial characterized by the sincere belief that if you just add more glaze maybe miraculously everything will suddenly be fine. This is not how life works.

How life actually works is, the date of this post is National Bundt Cake Day 2020 and I had every intention of figuring out what went wrong with my Electric Lemonade Bundt and fixing it and posting an actual successful recipe for this cake and that never happened because 2020 but I didn’t want my legion of fan coming to the blog and seeing my 2020 cake and reading me bragging about how it’s my 10th time baking an original Bundt every November 15th and being like “WAIT JUST A DAMN MINUTE” when she only counted 8 previous NBCD posts because you never want to disappoint your mom like that.

So here I am. Accepting what was in 2019. Accepting that 2020 has not been the better year we all thought it would be.

But I will fix this recipe someday. And I did bake a much better cake this year.

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