When you bake a bundt cake, be sure the oven is set on BAKE--not BROIL. On my oven, this is an easy mistake to make. I was making the dessert for a "catered" dinner that someone had won in a raffle by the parents' club at my sons' school, so it had to look good. Everything went great until I started to smell something burning: it was the top of the cake. No time to start over! That dessert had to come from the bakery. Years later, I felt somewhat better when I read in one of James Beard's cookbooks that he had done the same thing.

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