Bundt Cake Recipes and Why Martha Stewart Can’t Help It

It irritates me when people get their knickers in a knot about Martha Stewart and her persnickety perfection. I don’t know if she gets that reaction because she taps into some kind of latent feelings of domestic inadequacy or what, but I say live and let live. If you want to have the most pristine collection of drabware displayed in a rehabbed armoire into which you installed custom display shelves, let Martha inspire you. If you want to cultivate cat hair tumbleweed in your home and drink exclusively from your collection of rinsed-out Big Gulp cups, that's fine too and then just ignore her.

Besides, I really think that Martha probably deserves our sympathy rather than our scorn. Normally, I don’t believe in sympathy for the wealthy, but for some reason, Martha and all her wads of cash get a pass from me. Actually not for some reason, for A reason, and one I can identify with.

Martha strikes me as the kind of woman driven by a very particular kind of inner demon. It’s not the clichéd one you might be thinking about to say, something about having some need to prove herself and be the best because ultimately she feels like she has no value. No, this demon is different, it’s the demon of “The thought occurred to me.”

I know this demon because I live with it and I am friends with at least one other person who also has the same one. I also see women come into the shop and I can spot the faint outline of the gargoyle-like silhouette of this demon on their back.

They are asking for scores of miniature whisks to tie on the boxes for the favors for a wedding. Or for black food coloring so they can make detailed soccer balls cookies for their kids, and when I respond “Well, just draw some dots! Don’t try to make the little hexagon!!” I can see in their eyes they might nod and agree but they’re going to go home and try to make a soccer ball cookie that LOOKS AS MUCH LIKE A SOCCER BALL AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE. Their parting words are often “I’ll probably be up all night doing this.”

And then they usually are. My friend Sarah lives with the demon too, and I have accompanied her on a late night shopping trip to find culinary lavender so that she could work late into the wee hours to make not one but TWO types of cookies to give to complete strangers coming to her house on a garden tour. (Participating in the tour, of course, meant months of serious and dutiful gardening as well.)

I think people free of this demon assume people like this embark on these quests for some kind of recognition or approval or something. That is part of it, but it’s secondary. The common element I’ve seen in myself and in these women is primarily that once I think I COULD do this complicated and difficult thing, I must. Again, once the thought occurs, it’s no longer an option to scale back or try something less ambitious. It must be attempted. As though our idea created some of karmic duty that must be carried out and made manifest in the world.

My most recent brush with this demon came at that same friend Sarah’s wedding shower. I was put in charge of cake. I think the shower hostess thought that meant I would be the person responsible for purchasing a cake. Instead, I decided that buying a cake for thirty people would be too expensive, so why don’t I “save money by doing it myself.” (I fall for this total fallacy of logic EACH and EVERY time.)

And of course I can’t just make ONE kind of cake because ONE kind of cake is not as fun as THREE. With each having its own matching topping or sauce. And why don’t I make them a whole test run so I can have my chef boss taste them since of course it would be too boring to do something I’ve done before and so I’m using recipes I’ve never tried? And why don’t I spend a gajillion dollars and just not sleep for a couple days and get behind in my day job?

I am just so sure this is what happens with Martha. So there’s really no reason to resent. It's not done with any intention to stick it to anybody or even to show off. And it’s not fun. Well, it’s not any normal person’s idea of fun.

So in case you ever need to make three cakes each with its own matching sauce…or just want one, here are links to the pretty successful internet recipes I made.

I made them all in a I believe 10-cup heart-shaped Bundt pan (I’m not normally a heart-shaped anything kind of person, but it’s what we had at the shop and it fit the occasion). I served the sauces all separate so folks could put on as much/as little as they liked. If the recipes called for buttering/flouring the pan, I didn’t – I just used a nonstick and sprayed some of that flour+Pam stuff in it. That stuff kind of frightens me from a “What chemicals are these, exactly?” perspective but f it I was making three damn cakes twice. So a corner was cut.

What turned out to be gratifying about the whole endeavor was not only that people enjoyed them, but that it seemed to be pretty evenly split which cake people liked best.

• Chocolate Whisky Cake with Fluthered Whipped Cream (Fluthered is apparently Irish slang for drunk. I did not try the cake that accompanies the whipped cream recipe, but it might be worth a try too.)
• Pumpkin Spice Cake with Orange Rum Sauce (I found the Buttermilk icing with the cake recipe underwhelming, but the Rum Sauce worked well..haven’t tried the cake recipe that accompanies it.)
• Lemon Bundt Cake with Raspberry Sauce (I omitted the blueberries with no adverse results. Because I hold the somewhat controversial view that fruit is generally too virtuous to make a truly satisfyingly bad-for-you dessert, I have never attempted a raspberry sauce before, but I must say it was extraordinarily simple to make and surprisingly tasty. I think I threw a little lemon juice in there too.)

Update on Sunday, November 18, 2007 at 07:35PM by Leslie Seaton

Photo of cake!