Hot Sauce Gingerbread Cake w/ice creams de jour

Gingerbread Cake

A birthday at work! Score. It was a co-worker's birthday & I was asked (which always makes me happy!) to make a cake. But, for this particular person, the cake had to be unique. It is always exciting when someone or a group of people like trying odd flavor combinations - those of which usually turn out to taste good, and not weird like they sound - but not everyone is so willing to try these types of things...

Chocolate Merlot Frozen Yogurt

The cake was one of Oprah's favorite cakes - the recipe is here. It is made of a rather odd combination of hot sauce (like Tobasco), ginger water & cane syrup. Because it was baked in a bundt pan, which usually means a large amount of dense batter, it had to be baked for almost an hour. Which, is part of the reason I am slightly obsessed with bundt cakes right now. They get a nice, dark, but thin crust around the entire cake. This looks awesome on a light colored cake, but even if you have a darker colored cake - the nice, slightly crunchy, chewy texture of the cake crust is yummy!

Then, the cake was frosted with a meringue that was toasted with a torch, of course! Fun & tasty. It was a nice light frosting that paired well with the spicy cake - much better suited to this cake than a butter cream would have been.

I also made a few ice creams, knowing I could make some 'out there' flavors! Sadly, I only have a picture of the one here...a Chocolate Merlot Frozen Yogurt, a Sweet Corn & Raspberry Ice Cream & a Key Lime, Ginger, Cayenne, Coconut Ice Cream. I have to say, I liked them all. Of course, they were all from Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams book, or slight variations on her recipes.