This is a photo of a Bundt cake, placed on a festive plate. Lemon yellow icing drips and gleams down the sides and on the top. The plate is set on a wooden table.

How Do We Dance When Our Bundts Are Burning?

This is a photo of a Bundt cake, placed on a festive plate. Lemon yellow icing drips and gleams down the sides and on the top. The plate is set on a wooden table.

To avoid unnecessary house explosions, thigh burns, and scorched shorts on the Fourth of July, I’m blowing the flaming popsicle stand that is my neighborhood. I’m sure the “rocket’s red blare” and “bombs bursting in air” look amazeballs, but I wouldn’t really know for sure because usually, I’m in full cat freak-out mode, searching for a spot under the bed where I can hide and/or urinate.

Fireworks are illegal in our area, but that doesn’t stop a few determined souls who’ve had some beers, juiced up their confidence, and tapped into their undiagnosed pyromaniac tendencies. (And, no. The police aren’t coming, unless your house is actually on fire, and even in that case, they’re waking up the fire crew.) Also, if you ask some of these fireworks-frenzied neighbors, they’ll say they know what they are doing because they work at Boeing. But the words, “Relax, I work at Boeing” aren’t doing it for me.

Over the past few years, though, Nate and I have begged/bribed some trustworthy neighbors to just casually walk by our house between the hours of 6:00 p.m. and midnight on the Fourth of July to check for flames while the Fixin’ Leaks ‘n Leeks Team eats dinner in a favorite Indian restaurant and catches a late, late movie (with our phone notices activated, just in case). It has been wonderful!

Still, on the morning of the Fourth of July, while Nate waters the lawn, the roof, the deck, the plants—and sets out fire extinguishers for neighborhood use, I feel a bit jittery. So, I crank up the music and start baking to calm my nerves.

A bundt cake feels appropriate because I’d like to kick some neighbors’ Bundts. I can only do so metaphorically. Also, there’s this song I remember from Midnight Oil that I love so much: “How Do We Dance When Our Beds Are Burning?” I think it’s the theme song for this Bundt cake, so I’ve decided to play it on repeat.

Feel free to do the same and move your Bundt in time to the music.

Here’s the recipe for a lemon Bundt cake that really does kick Bundt:

Ingredients:

1 ½ cups of flour

2 tsp. of baking powder

¼ tsp. salt

¾ cup of granulated sugar

½ cup of butter or neutral tasting oil (vegetable oil/canola/sunflower)

1 egg (or ¼ cup of egg whites/egg substitute)

¼ cup of lemon juice

1 cup of Greek yogurt (plain—vanilla or unflavored)

Icing:

1 cup of powdered sugar + 4 ½ tablespoons of lemon juice+ a few drops of yellow food coloring.

Method:

Mix the dry ingredients in one bowl. Mix the wet ingredients in another, then combine them. Grease/spray a Bundt pan with cooking spray. Bake at 350 F. for 35 minutes. Let the Bundt cake cool before flipping it over and icing/decorating it.

Results:

The lemon flavor really comes through on the icing! The cake part is super moist and has a hint of lemon, but when I make this cake again, I will increase the lemon juice to ½ cup and the sugar to one full cup.  

Serve this Bundt cake with:

  • A bullhorn to wake the neighborhood up early in the morning after they’ve been lighting fireworks all night
  • Fire extinguishers filled with lemon sprinkles
  • A garden hose filled with limoncello
  • At least twelve sofas filled with highly trained and extremely floofy emotional support cats
  • Buckets of Excedrin
  • Giant ambulance-shaped bottles of Chardonnay

Your Turn: What calms your nerves? Is it baking? Cats? Let me know in the comments!

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Published by ckennedy

Author of the DIY blog: Fixin' Leaks and Leeks. Paper/Rock Writing Consultation, Sole Proprietor.

31 thoughts on “How Do We Dance When Our Bundts Are Burning?”

  1. Thanks for sharing your recipe – sounds yummy! Calming my nerves? I chew gum, quite madly. Many years ago I used to smoke and pace, now I chew gum and pace. Works – for me anyway. Sorry to hear that you have to go through this worry every year. Ugh.

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    1. It hasn’t, yet. Some neighbors, who have lit them off on their own property, have experienced fires that they’ve put out quickly–and they don’t seem to mind. They just go right back at it.

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    1. Those sound like great memories! I love fireworks–in designated areas with professionals lighting them off. But dangerously close to homes–with professional grade fireworks in the hands of “just anybody” during wildfire season makes me a bit more nervous than I’d like to be.

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  10. As a kid we used to celebrate ‘Bonfire Night’ – connected to Guy Fawkes, and called also ‘Cracker Night’. It was phased out in the 70s and 80s Australia wide due to safety concerns – all except the Northern Territory where it’s still legal for the populace to privately light firecrackers. Our street was a circle/crescent and had a park in the middle. Each year we, the neighbourhood, built a bonfire in the middle of the park with anything that would burn safely. Then came the night – it was lit. Everyone had a ball, it was truly joyful. These days only those with professional legal licenses can legitimately light any type of firecracker – though, as you would guess – some still do.

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