Since this was the first one, I hadn't realized the importance of fully cooling before putting on glaze yet, so you can see it was almost completely absorbed. (I have not fully learned my lesson as you will continue to see, as sometimes I make the cake Tuesday afternoon and don't give myself enough time to let it cool :P) I think I used some combination of the linked recipe and this one.

Possibly overcorrecting, I made the caramel "glaze" way too thick, so it ended up being more like (still tasty!) caramel frosting.

This one has a bit of a backstory -- my first idea was lemon, but my friend who is a very big fan of lemon and makes lemon bars for her dorm at an impressive frequency couldn't come to squares that particular night. So I asked Google for some help:

And this one was for our caller Ted Lizotte's birthday! The candles are arranged in the starting positions of dancers in a square, with the same color scheme as used by Taminations.

The marbling didn't work exactly as intended, but still looks cool!

I was out of town on Tuesday for Thanksgiving, so I made this (Thanksgiving-themed!) one the day before with a friend, who brought it in my stead.

Continuing the theme, the weirdest flavor so far, which I thought was quite good!

This week was graduation week for the Tech Squares class, where they finished learning all of the calls and became members of the club. So I decided to make a really fancy one, which might be my favorite so far! I recommend clicking the pictures to see them bigger, since I think it looks really pretty.

Some assembly required! I mostly used the linked recipe, but took this recipe's filling method.

This one has fresh corn both in the cake and the icing.

To explain that middle picture, I sent it to the Tech Squares Discord server with the caption: "i have left two clues for today's flavor in the picture! one of them is a real clue, and one of them is a tricky red herring. can you solve the puzzle, and deduce which is which?"

Just a few days before this one, the thought occurred to me "ooh, I wonder when the next time April 1st is on a Tuesday is? I could do something funny for that". I did not realize it was the next one! So I made this "Bundt cake," which I impassively claimed to everyone at the dance bewildered by the hole-less, non-circular shape that it was a totally normal Bundt cake, just like I had been bringing the past many weeks. And that I also had accumulated a bunch of holes from punching out the middles of previous Bundt cakes, so I figured I ought to bring those as well. The flavor was also part of the joke, as I told people this was a perfectly vanilla Bundt cake.

If you've never seen a key lime, you might not realize how tiny they are; here's a Bundt cake for scale. I got an entire bag of 18 key limes without even considering that it might not be enough, and ended up having to augment with some more (regular) bottled lime juice.

The recipe said to "use extra mango for garnish" 🤷

This one was supposed to have a jelly filling, but it all sank to the bottom and then stuck to the pan. I did manage to get almost all of it out, and a friend cleverly rebranded it as "raspberry upside-down cake" :D

Flavor inspired by a contra dance played at BIDA.

Decidedly not a cake, but suggested for the first week of June by a friend, who informs me it is a classic dessert of their childhood!

Pictured on the makeshift snack table (dancing was in an unexpected room that week).

I did not make this one! I was out of town, so a friend baked and brought this one instead.

This was the one year anniversary of the Bundt cake era! Still having never repeated a flavor, I pointed out that the power of combinatorics offers an enormous pool of flavors to choose from by combining three random fruits. That feels a bit like cheating, but this particular combination of three fruits is special for reasons involving my master's thesis which I will not attempt to elaborate on here.

Since I am guessing I am the first person to make a cake with this specific combination of flavors, it seems only fair that I get to name it -- the mirror image of the square dance call Sock It To Me happens to be called Here Comes The Judge (also a Laugh-In reference), so it seemed appropriately fitting given the history of my whole Bundt cake escapade.

The last image is a birthday cake for my Bundt cakes! A friend made it without telling me, which I thought was very sweet, but it was also extremely confusing to walk into the room and see a Bundt cake that wasn't mine. It was a lemon cake disguised as a strawberry cake.

This one looks very innocuous, and it in fact tasted very innocuous as well; I would never have guessed it was made with a can of tomato soup poured directly into the batter.

I was also out of town this week, so these two cakes were made by two other friends. I had not heard of Malört before this, but it apparently tastes very very bad. They brought a second (non-Bundt) cake in case people wanted to actually enjoy their dessert.

My housemate had too much of the stuff pictured, which I was very glad to help with.

Tech Squares has an amateur night occasionally, where people who are interested in calling but don't do it much can try it out. This week was Amateur Night, and I figured that this opportunity should extend to the cake baking as well; so this is another cake that I did not make, but instead was baked by an amateur.

This week dragonfruit was supposedly on sale for $2.99/lb at Star Market, but there seemed to be a bug where they forgot the "/lb" part and it was just $2.99 regardless of how much you got. I decided against purchasing Star Market's entire stock of dragonfruit upon discovering this, but I still got enough for a cake.

For this one I'll just copy the message I sent in the Tech Squares Discord server:

⚠️ baking pop quiz ⚠️ (only experts can solve!!)

suppose you take your cake out of the oven and check it, and you discover that it is slightly underbaked. should you:

(a) put it back

(b) decide "eh, it'll be fine, it'll finish cooking in the pan or something" and take it out, and after removing it from the pan discover that it is still gooey in the middle, and make an extremely clumsy attempt to move it onto some tin foil on a tray while destroying its shape in the process, and then proceed to try to get it to finish baking which ends up being 4 intervals of 10+ minutes somehow, and then afterwards return it to the serving tray in a futile attempt to salvage it

anyway, just a fun little hypothetical quiz scenario. here are some random pictures i found on the internet as thematic support

Expanding the collection of "cakes" that are not actually cakes!

Unlike my friends who made the Malört cake, who have kind and generous souls and are willing to provide a good cake alongside a bad cake, I have no qualms with delivering an unashamedly bad cake with no compensation.

(vaguely Halloween themed)

This one also has a backstory -- quoting from Discord conversations:

[me]: there are passionfruit next to the dragonfruit at star market and therefore that is this week's flavor

[friend]: Now I'm worried about how far away the like broccoli is on the shelves...

[other friend, who made the Malört cake and helped with this one]: I just looked up recipes and apparently broccoli is good in vegan chocolate cake. I'm not sure what purpose it serves. Maybe as both the vegan and the terrible-sounding-cake baker, I should try this

Apparently you're not supposed to be able to taste the broccoli. I sure could taste the broccoli, as could several others who thought it was terrible (I thought it was still pretty good).

(this frosting was, uh, somewhat troublesome)

Since I was leaving for Thanksgiving the same day as the dance, I made this the previous day by walking down the baking aisle and grabbing random boxes (lemon cake mix and blueberry Jello powder, which as it turns out combine to be strikingly green).

Originally supposed to be just cherimoya, but I didn't have enough so I supplemented the rest with banana.

My friend whose cake baking reputation had been tarnished by Malört and broccoli cakes wanted to restore it, so this was a recreation of the best cake she had ever had (as previously made by a roommate).

Another guest cake because I was away! (my flight actually got back the same day, so I went from the airport directly to the dance, making it the first time I got to experience the feeling of the weekly cake flavor being a surprise)