Bambi Cakes

 

You may be wondering... What are Bambi Cakes?  Well if you have a husband who likes to hunt like I do, then you probably have a lot of lean ground meat. Generally my husband harvests 1 deer each year or occasionally an elk.  So these are small venison meatloaves. We really like meatloaf around here but in the summer I don't like to have my oven on for very long so I decided to bake mini- meatloaves in a muffin pan and chop down that bake time significantly.  Now if you don't have venison you can substitute lean ground beef or turkey. I guess they'd be called Beef Cakes?

This photo only has the first few ingredients, but you get the idea.

Preheat Oven: 350 degrees
Meatloaf: combine the following ingredients in a bowl.

• ~ lbs ground venison (when I packaged our burger I filled a ziploc w/ 1 1/2 cups of meat). It has  pretty much zero fat in it, because deer fat doesn't keep well we remove it all before grinding.
• 1/2 Tbsp minced dry onion
• 1 egg
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 1 clove garlic minced (1/2 tsp of garlic minced in a jar)
• 3 saltine crackers crushed by hand
• 1/8 tsp pepper
• 1/3 c. finely grated carrot

Spray 6 or so cupcake spaces with cooking spray (unless you are using meat that has a little bit of fat). This cupcake pan is a smaller one so you may only get 6 cakes if you use a standard pan. Grease more spots as you go (you don't want to spray oil in it and not fill that spot or it will just burn onto the pan).

Sauce:
To top them I made an asian inspired glaze for the adults and just put Ketchup spirals on the kiddos'.

3 Tbsp hoisin sauce (love this stuff)
1 tsp white vinegar
1 Tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp brown sugar

Spoon sauce onto the raw Bambi cakes (you could also use your favorite BBQ sauce (like Bullseye which is now made w/out high Fructose corn syrup)  For meatloaf I often make a simple BBQ sauce with 2 parts Ketchup 1 part brown sugar and 1/2 part Worcestershire and maybe some mustard.

Bake for 30-40 minutes until they look super hot and bubbly. Cool for a few minutes before removing from the pan so it can re-absorb all it's juices.  Put your pan to soak after removing the meat and it will wash up easily after dinner.

ENJOY! We ate them with Brown Rice Pilaf (from my Recommendations page) and grapes.  The kids loved them too.  On Friday we had them again with corn on the cob.