campfire cake

Sunday was our son-in-law’s birthday.

Cliff is 45. Wow. Anyway his older daughter Brianna and I conspired to make him one of my upside down cakes.

I had the stuff with me. Brown sugar, walnuts, butter, cake mix with oil and eggs, the whole thing. So I put it together with a bit of help from Bri.

This time daughter had a big bed of coals in the fire pit so we decided to use that, besides I had put the charcoal briquettes some where and did not find them until later.

So we put the dutch oven in the coals. I took a little shovel I had and put some coals on the top. It looked good.

Every 5 minutes I would rotate the lid one direction ⅓ turn and the oven the other way to keep the heat even. The box said to bake it 30 minutes I thought, so had one of the boys set his wrist watch for a timer.

I remembered being told to be careful opening the oven door while a cake is baking, so I skipped that and stayed with the timer.

At the 25 minute mark I peeked inside.

It was an awesome sight. It was uniformly baked on all sides.

It was as black as soot, and stayed black for the first ⅜ of an inch every direction.

We cut it in 8 pieces and picked out the good parts in the center.

Later we did it again and this time used those briquettes and did a lot of peeking, and it turned out wonderful.

I am learning and I am living. I hope the former is on a shorter curve than the latter!