Maybe I should start calling this blog West of the Rhubarb. I’m clearly obsessed with this old-fashioned fruit-that-is-really-a-vegetable. It’s tart! It’s pink! It’s versatile! Rhubarb is bae. (My eleven year old me that I couldn’t write that. So naturally I did.)

The other week, I arrived at the farmers’ market late, something that I hate to do. So many vendors were already cleaned out. But the one good thing about arriving late to a farmers’ market is that the farmers are willing to cut deals. I asked a bored young man how much to take all the remaining rhubarb off his hands. He quoted me a rock-bottom price and we both walked away happy.

But then I had to decide what to do with my motherlode. One bunch got pressed into service as a mouth-puckeringly tart galette that I brought to a potluck. (Children ran away from it in terror, but several adults told me how much they liked it.) That left me with three pounds of pink and green stalks. Two pounds got turned into jam — one must preserve the harvest after all! And the remaining pound became these adorable miniature Bundt cakes.

I bought a miniature Bundt pan for a recipe in my upcoming food swap cookbook (Storey Publishing, Spring 2016) and since then have found so many uses for it. These individually-sized cakes make for a charming dinner party dessert and are perfect for gifting. The end of the school year is rapidly approaching: two or three of these mini Bundt cakes packed into a pretty bakery box would make an outstanding teacher gift, don’t you think?

The key to working with a mini Bundt pan like this one is to not overfill the cavities. If you do, the dough will rise and cover the hole in the middle. If that does happen, you can always cut the hole out later. But better to simply fill the cavities only 2/3 full to begin with.

This recipe was inspired by a lemon buttermilk Bundt cake in my favorite fruit dessert cookbook, Rustic Fruit Desserts. I decided to play around with the flavoring a little by adding warm spices like cardamom and ginger, which complement rhubarb’s tang, and relying on orange in lieu of lemon.

Rhubarb and rose are also a natural pairing, so I added a splash of rose water to my dough. With rose water, a little goes a long way; the last thing you want is to feel like you are eating soap. If you don’t have rose water in your pantry, feel free to skip it or use vanilla extract instead.

This recipe makes a dozen miniature cakes. My mini Bundt pan, as you can see above, only holds six cakes, so I baked them in batches. A dozen small cakes is a lot if you are not using them as gifts or bringing them to a food swap. Luckily, these little cakes freeze remarkably well. Just wrap well in plastic and pack into a freezer bag. Then you can have a few adorable mini Bundt cakes on hand to serve last-minute guests or just to surprise your family.

These moist and tender cakes are perfect with a light dusting of powdered sugar, but if you really wanted to get fancy, you could top them with a citrusy glaze by mixing powdered sugar with lemon or orange juice until you reached the right consistency and drizzling it over the top.