Thursday, November 05, 2009

The Gentrification of Cake

Since mentioning my obsession with Bundt cake, I've received four recipes and this tidbit: "Google Tunnel of Fudge."

Preemptively cringing in case my results turned out obscene, I typed "Tunnel of Fudge" into my browser's search box.

Aha! That's the chocolate Bundt with the gooey center that I remembered from childhood! But apparently it's hard to make, due to the scarcity of some key ingredient. Lots of scratch recipes listed workarounds but I admit that I was getting apprehensive about this project as I read about the dangers of scooping flour versus lightly measuring it into a cup by spoon. Goodness. Cake is complicated.

A few tentative clicks then took me to this.

It looks like the same mix I'd have used as a kid.

I ordered it. I guess we'll find out. But I gotta admit, paying $8 plus shipping for a cake mix does strike me as a bit silly.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Uh, there's a recipe on pillsbury.com that doesn't seem to use any particularly obscure ingredients.

Ed Ward said...

What's the mysterious scarce ingredient?

Marie Javins said...

The claim, as it goes, is that the recipe on that site doesn't really do that job properly, and that the necessary ingredients for getting the job done are no longer made by Pillsbury. It included their dry "frosting mix," which is no longer made.

A lot of people have listed workarounds. And the complaint is that this recipe on Pillsbury, and that box mix I bought, supposedly produce a brownie-like center, rather than the gooey pudding center we remember.

I'm just reading and reporting here, not having tried it myself. I am pretty sure that the tons of people talking about this (surely all being far superior bakers to me) indicate that it's probably correct that it's tough to get it right now.

Linda said...

I'm sure the cake mix I used when you were a kid was a fairly cheap one, probably from Memco.

/Mom