Harvey Wallbanger Cake

I'm visiting Nashville again. Surprise surprise. My good friends Emily and Aaron agreed to let me set up camp in the living room of their new apartment for the week, and one goal Emily and I set for my visit on top of catching up, enjoying the city, and getting her new kitchen organized, was to return to the good ol' Booze Cakes cookbook (Aaron was part of all of these goals too, of course, but  he may have been less aware that Booze Cakes were always part of the plan. Nevertheless, he was a good sport since eating baked goods was his primary role in this particular project). So on Friday, after perusing many tempting options, Emily and I settled on a cake meant to capture the flavors of the  Harvey Wallbanger cocktail, named after the popular Manhattan Beach surfer who was a regular patron of Duke's Blackwatch Bar on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. What better inspiration for a summery cake than a drink that would fit right into Beach Blanket Bingo? 

Basically, the Harvey Wallbanger is a screwdriver with Galliano, an anise-flavored liqueur, floated over the top. Of course we decided that it was only appropriate to make actual Harvey Wallbangers to sustain us while we labored through the arduous six-ingredient, two-step project, and at this point I would like to officially register a request for someone to please remind me how much I dislike anise-flavored things if I ever, EVER get the idea to make this drink (or cake) in the future.

So to start, here are the components. See the boxed cake mix and the packet of instant pudding? That's called cheating at life. But the cookbook told us these were all the things we needed, aside from eggs, oil and liquor, so we drank our drinks and followed instructions.

Our cake's inspiration: the Harvey Wallbanger was allegedly invented in 1952, the same year that Queen Elizabeth took the throne and the TV show Dragnet premiered. My grandma surprised me last Christmas when we were chatting and she off-handedly mentioned how she used to drink these on New Year's Eve when she was younger. So Emily and I toasted to cool grandmothers everywhere as we sampled our drinks and started baking.

Dump all of the ingredients into a bowl at once and mix? Check.

Pour into a well-buttered-and-floured bundt pan and make another cocktail because maybe you'll miraculously start liking the flavor of Galliano this second time around? Check.

After 45 minutes, our cake was ready to cool and come out of the pan. It smelled as good as this picture looks. No joke.

Someone may have been a little over zealous with the flouring of the pan, but that cake sure didn't stick when we flipped it over. We'd also used Emily's non-stick cake pan from William Sonoma which was pretty boss, so that probably didn't hurt either. The cake cooled for half an hour or so before we were ready to move onto the last step: prepare and apply an orange glaze lightly infused with vodka and Galliano...

The trouble began when Emily slipped off to the kitchen without telling anyone. She was trying to make glaze in stealth mode so I wouldn't notice her using her own recipe instead of following the Booze Cakes instructions. Aaron and I caught her just as she was adding a few glugs of OJ to a bowlful of confectioner's sugar. Now, any of you who read this blog regularly know how I was recently burned when I tried to use the "I'll Just Eyeball It" technique to measure small amounts of concentrated liquids (if you have no idea what I'm talking about but you care to find out, refer to the Blueberry Sour Cream Tartlets post from last month), so you can imagine my dismay when I caught Emily in the middle of just such a transgression. At that point, we had no choice but to hold a a glaze-off, in which I followed the cookbook instructions to make the cake glaze and Emily tossed ingredients into a bowl in what appeared to be a helter skelter fashion. Aaron agreed to be our objective judge. Guess who won. (Also guess which one of us neglected to mention that she'd been making glazes for large batches of holiday cookies for decades, a fact which, had I been cognizant of, would have saved me much consternation and general freaking out). Emily's was better. Way better.

After the superior glaze has been adequately drizzled onto our cake, we'd reached the end of the recipe, but we felt like some elements of visual appeal were missing. After all, we eat with all of our senses, right?

So Emily got out her mandolin and sliced us up some paper thin orange garnishes. Much better.

And while we're covering things with things, why not add a little dusting of confectioner's sugar?

Witness this open toolbox, mail pile, and fancy dessert: If I were feeling poetic, I'd suggest that kitchen tables were a nice symbol of complexity because they're the point of intersection where so many diverse elements of life come to rest and temporarily juxtapose one another, inviting us to consider how the different aspects of our existence are similarly bound together yet always in tension.  Life influencing dessert, or dessert influencing life?  

so much depends
upon

a liquor soaked
cake

glazed with powdered
sugar

beside the red
toolbox.