Salvage Your Broken Bundt Cake By Turning It Into This English Delight

It's happened to even the most experienced bakers at least once or twice in their lives. You take a beautiful bundt cake out of the oven, excited to prepare it, only to find that it's a crumbly, cracking mess. You could cry about it, or you could pick yourself up, take a page from an English cookbook, and turn that broken bundt into a tasty trifle, instead.

Trifles are incredibly easy to make; even Paul Hollywood agrees they're the best desserts for beginning bakers. Just take your broken pieces of bundt cake and slice them into squares to the best of your ability. Grab a glass bowl or trifle dish and layer those bundt squares along with puddings, sweet sauces, whipped cream, fruits, nuts, and other dessert-inspired goodies. The great thing about a trifle is that it doesn't have to be perfect. It can be, if you feel inclined to arrange it that way, but on the whole, trifles are meant to be sweet and crumbly. There's no way to tell that what was once a ruined bundt cake is now a trifle masterpiece.

Once you've got the hard part out of the way, the fun begins when you layer the trifle. Some bakers suggest that you begin with a layer of whipped cream as the base, a tip that will supposedly take your trifle to new heights, but others advise that starting with a crumbly layer of cake will suffice. You'll want to give your trifle a theme and coordinate all the other toppings to go along with it. So, if you need to salvage that blueberry bundt cake that came out looking a little worse for wear, you could try turning it into the base of a cherry-pistachio trifle with layers of grapefruit pastry cream, stewed cherries, and pistachios until it reaches the brim of the glass.

There are plenty of reasons your bundt cake may have broken. Maybe you forgot to grease the sides and that delicious lemon bundt mix stuck to every nook and cranny. Maybe you overmixed or accidentally overprocessed those precious gluten strands. Maybe you got a little eager and tried to flip the pan before the cake was done cooling, hence part of it landed on the counter and the other part is still hanging from the lip. You could avoid these simple mistakes by slowing down in the kitchen and carefully following directions, or you could turn your mushy mistake into a decadent chocolate trifle and pretend you meant for it to turn out that way all along.