ABC bakers; Orange chiffon Tweed cake

*cough* imagine this is my Sound of Music voice, pretending I can sing (and read but that is a story that follows)…

“Let’s start at the very beginning
A very good place to start
When you read you begin with A-B-C…”

To introduce you to the fact that I joined another group of bakers; ABC-bakers founded by Hanaâ; read all about it here. ABC stands for Avid Bakers Challenge.

Each month a recipe is chosen and on every first Tuesday of the month, we'll post our experiences and photos of the baked creation, but never the original recipe from the book, as they like to encourage everyone to buy the book.
For the year 2010, they've chosen to bake from Flo Braker's "Baking For All Occasions".

I guess I just need a challenge after all to bake those items I longingly look at in my cookbooks and then dismiss because either:
A) too many eggs/butter/cream
B) too much hassle
C) I can’t
D) who is going to eat it (well, easy to answer that one)
E) my hips are doing well enough without….
or all of the above!

So on to my first challenge, due today! An Orange Chiffon Tweed Cake. The tweed here is not the fabric but the sprinkling of chocolate throughout the cake.

Really for a brief moment I thought of contacting Hanaâ how to prepare the pan, because the recipe just said: “prepared pan”. I decided against asking because well, I do know how to prepare a pan right? Wrong! I used a teflon coated tube pan and sprayed with baking spray.
The cake had to be inverted while resting on a long necked bottle and stay there hanging for 3 hours to completely cool. (Now talk about scary, I never tried an angel food cake because of A, B, C, see above).

Sure enough had you looked into my kitchen this morning you would have found me wearing big oven gloves, a precariously positioned bottle with a long neck and an inverted cake that immediately started to slide down the bottle.

And only 1 pair of hands.

Hot Damn!

Not sure how I did it, but I managed to shove it back into the form with those big gloved hands while balancing the bottle trying not to upset the cake, causing only minor damage. It's resting on a wire rack now, looking very sad and deflated.

So am I.

The funny thing is that while I was contemplating what to do (I can contemplate very very fast) my first instinct was that I had to take a picture of this stupid situation. Which of course wasn’t possible. Why Why do we only have two hands hm?
On the bright side, next to my elbow I can see an inverted (!) pan of mini-bundts, balanced on two small glass bowls, cakes still intact! See my tube pan wasn’t big enough so I decided to use a 6-bundt pan for the remainder of the batter. Hope that one works out!

{Ploink!} I suddenly remember why I never use that pan… and why it probably was in that yard sale in the first place. It’s in the trash now.

I hope you’ll understand why I didn’t make the zabaglione that had to go with it. Not today. Is it too soon to ban myself from ABC?

Edit to note:
- I should have looked up how to treat a pan for baking these type of cakes...

- the 6 mini bundt all disappeared; the boys love this cake

- the texture of this cake is lovely! I really like the orange shining through and the fact that it's not dry at all, still I think it could use something creamy to go with it. (wow, that's why Flo wanted us to make a sabayon to go with it in the first place I guess).

- Note to self: do grate the chocolate using a food processor, I used a knife and chopped but it's so much nicer to have an even sprinkling of chocolate throughout the cake.

- all in all: a success recipe which deserves a better treatment and a next time!