Daring Bakers: Caramel Cake

As a maternity-leave induced lady of leisure, I looked forward to this month's Daring Bakers challenge as one I could do during my luxurious free time. In between baths and coffee mornings, I saw myself baking cakes to have ready for my husband after a hard day's work. This turned out to be ambitious dreaming. Long baths have occurred, but necessitated by 3rd trimester nausea or just feelings of being enormous and wanting to find a venue in which I was weightless (and, undoubtedly, elegant and streamlined). Coffee mornings have been acheived, but at the cost of wiping me out from the effort of a) getting up b) taking an hour-long bath c) looking presentable and d) traveling on public transportation. Mr A&N has actually had his fair share of banana bread this month, mainly to use up those bananas I've felt too ill to eat and made while I've been sitting down at the table. The long and short of it is that this month's challenge was done at the last minute, over a couple of days, and is only now being enjoyed as I blog about it. Oh well - I'm sure next month, when the baby's here, it will all fall into place even more easily.

The caramel cake comes from Shuna Fish Lydon at Bay Area Bites, as chosen by the trio of Dolores at Chronicles in Culinary Curiosity, Alex at Blondie and Brownie, and Jenny at Foray into Food. The cake thrives on caramel syrup added into the cake, and caramelized butter in the icing. To me, the cake was more successful than the icing, which overwhelmed me with its sweetness. The cake smelled wonderfully fragrant and rich during the mixing, and it took tremendous will-power not to lick the raw batter from the spoons (will-power I actually didn't have in the end, since I licked...but only a little). I was rewarded for my near-saintliness when the spring-form pan I was baking the cake in didn't hold itself together tighlty and dripped a slow and delicious cascade of cake batter onto the pan at the bottom of the oven, waiting to be eaten 20 minutes before the rest of the cake was ready. I couldn't pick out the caramel flavor, but thought it was like a supped-up version of a vanilla cake, delicately sweet and still wonderful to smell.

Thanks to the hostesses (and Shuna) for the challenge, which promises to give me something to eat this week with my leisurely morning coffee before I head up to my hour-long baths.