Week 24: Pistachio Cake

I am especially proud of this cake. I think it turned out beautifully and tasted great too. I owed my dad a belated Father’s Day cake since I was out of town on Dad’s Day. Pistachio is one of my dad’s favorite flavors, so I had no doubt this one would be a hit. And based on my previous experience with using yellow cake mix as a base (Beer Cake and Irish Cream Cake), I knew this recipe would yield a super moist and tasty treat. The only change I made was adding a full tablespoon of almond extract instead of the called for 1/2 teaspoon.

Here’s the mise en place. And, by the way, you have to hear how my dad pronounces mise en place. Wikipedia’s phonetic spelling of the term is: miz on plas. But my dad’s is something along the lines of “mice in plays”. I think I prefer the latter.

The pistachio pudding was a challenge to find here in Manhattan. I checked three grocery stores before I started calling around before making the trip to search the shelves.

As all cake mix cakes go, the hardest step is opening the box and dumping the mix into a bowl. I poured the dry pudding mix in with it and gave it a stir.

Next the instructions said to create a well in the middle of the dry ingredients and add the eggs, water, oil, extract, and food coloring.

Then you mix it all together until smooth and pour into a prepared bundt pan. Since I had a little trouble getting the previous week’s cake out of a bundt pan, I was extra generous with the cooking spray and used a sprinkling of the dry cake mix in place of flour.

The cake baked in about 50 minutes and puffed up quite a bit.

Once I flipped it out of the pan, I noticed it had a strange shape. The odd shape bundts sometimes take on continues to baffle me. But it’s nothing a little chocolate ganache can’t cover up.

For the chocolate ganache, I used this simple recipe, cutting the ingredients in half. Next time, I might opt to make a 1/4 recipe since I didn’t need too much for the drizzle.

I boiled 1/2 cup of cream in a sauce pan.

And then poured it over the chocolate in a small bowl.

I added a small dash of brandy for flavor and kept stirring till it was smooth and ready to drizzle.

I also chopped up some pistachios to decorate the top. I forgot how gorgeous pistachios are. Look at those colors!

I was really happy with how the finished product turned out.

Apologies about the poor quality of the below photo. It was taken with my cell phone, but I wanted to capture the inside of the cake. The 7 drops of food coloring was just enough to indicate the pistachio flavor without looking extra terrestrial.