whole orange bundt cake with chocolate ganache glaze...

Yes, you read that right, it's a recipe post, and not just any recipe post, but a cake recipe! Yay!  Steve is always wanting cake on the weekends (who wouldn't?) and last night he mentioned that he really wanted some rum cake.  I got online after Riggs went to bed and started searching for a good recipe.  I made rum cake at Christmas last year, but I wasn't the biggest fan of the recipe, so I wanted to find something new.  Most rum cake recipes that I find are made using box cake mix and pudding mix, two things that I never rarely have on hand to use, so I also wanted to find one that was completely from scratch.

At this point you might be wondering what all this has to do with Whole Orange Bundt Cake with Chocolate Ganache Glaze, but don't worry, I'm getting there.  I found a recipe for rum cake that was exactly what I was looking for on the food blog, Always Order Dessert.  The only problem?  I didn't have a few of the ingredients and wouldn't be able to get them until the next morning and the cake needed to sit overnight for the rum sauce/glaze to soak in.  At the bottom of the blog post about the Rum Cake was this tiny little link to another bundt cake that looked ridiculously delicious, so I clicked it.  Hello, Whole Orange Bundt Cake with Chocolate Ganache Glaze!  One of my most favorite things on earth about the holidays is the arrival of dark chocolate oranges stacked on the end-caps of our local grocery stores.  This was a cake that was like one big chocolate orange!  I immediately wrote down all the ingredients (for this and the rum cake, which I'll make next weekend) and planned on heading to the store before church in the morning to pick them all up.

Well, we didn't end up going to church (more on that later) but we did make it to the store and when we got home, I began getting everything ready for this amazing cake right away.  It is such an easy recipe to make, and yet it looks and tastes like a gourmet masterpiece.  I am seriously so. in. love. with this cake.  Steve loved it too, enough that he didn't even mention it not being a rum cake once (phew lol)!  You can find the directions and recipe over at Always Order Dessert, here.  I will definitely be making this cake at Christmas this year, and probably every year after that for ever and ever and ever.  It's that good.

Like I said, this recipe is super simple, with only 8 ingredients.  The most time consuming thing for me was processing the oranges, because I only have a teeny food processor.  I had to process them in little batches, I think it took me four or five to get them all done.  I think I need to ask for a big food processor for Christmas ;)

Ghiradelli bittersweet dark chocolate chips and heavy whipping cream.  Need I say more?

You can see the little tiny flecks of orange peel in this picture.  You can also see the amazing moist texture of the cake and the creamy chocolate glaze smothering the outside of the cake.  If you aren't drooling, something is wrong with you!  Soooo good.

............

Poor Riggs is sick, and woke up about 8 times last night from coughing, needing some milk to soothe him back to sleep.  Then he slept from about 2:30 to 8:30 straight, and even Steve and I slept in until about 7:30!  My favorite thing about Sundays by far this summer has been having Steve home when we wake up.  Every single other day of the week he is gone when I wake up, unless I get up early with him.  It was so nice to have an hour alone together just lazing around and enjoying the morning sun in our room before Riggs woke up coughing some more - :( poor little guy.  We all piled into the car together to get some things at the store, then came home and just stayed around the house all day, no church for us with mr. sicky.

Riggs was so happy to spend the day with Steve, and I was happy to have the extra set of eyes on Riggs so that I could spend nearly the whole day cooking in the kitchen.  During Riggs' afternoon nap I snuggled on the couch with Beau in the sun, it was so cozy.

After Steve gave Riggs a bath, I was carrying him to his room to get him dressed for bed.  But I couldn't resist taking a few pictures of his little rolls before getting him dressed.  Notice our weird expressions in that second picture?  Yeah, that's because he's peeing on me...

Happy Sunday!