Cherry Cake

For most of March I had my baking cut out for me – it was the month of perfecting several recipes for a job I was recruited for. A friend of mine was organizing a baby shower for a close friend, and asked me to bake a cake to serve 40 people and that could withstand a 3 and a half hour car ride, in either of her friend’s favorite cake flavors: cherry or spice cake. This already sounded like a challenge! I decided for ease in transport, I would make two, two layer cakes, one spice and one cherry, so we could all have our cake and eat it too… literally. ☺ I didn’t have to subject myself to the nightmares of a 3 layer cake toppling over with abrupt braking on the highway during the 3+ hour car ride, and the mother-to-be could enjoy both of her favorites on her special day. I had never made a cherry cake, and knew that this would be a perfect challenge for me – reinvent a cherry cake bursting with authentic cherry flavor and pieces of the tart fruit to match. Spice cake, on the other hand, seemed like it would be less of a challenge, so I knew where I would start. I decided to bake a few practice cakes to get the cherry cake down, which ended up being a harder job than I had anticipated, but full of humor nonetheless. Of course I have to share those with you, but, feel free to skip down to the widely enjoyed and approved final cake recipe below. ☺ I know you will enjoy it too.

The first two efforts found me back at the local grocery store, purchasing marachino cherries and at Trader Joe’s buying several bags of the Montmorency dried tart cherries, which I’ve been known to eat by the fistful… they are just that good. I made one cake in which I made a white cake batter, and added some of the marachino cherry juice as well as diced up marachino cherries. This cake was much too subtle and had an artificial cherry flavor… maybe great for a small child’s cake, but as this cake was to suit 40 grown adults, I kept looking. I made a white cake in which I rehydrated the dried cherries and added them to the batter. This ended up being more like a coffee cake with cherries that sunk to the bottom because they were too heavy. Tasted good, especially the bites at the bottom of the cake, ☺ but just not very cherry. It tasted like what it was – a white cake with some moist cherries in it.

Then, I decided to get creative. Where can I buy cherry juice? Cherry extract? Hmmm… I spent some time online, and settled on two products. From King Arthur Flour (www.kingarthurflour.com) I purchased their “natural” cherry flavored extract. Looking back on the experience I already cringe at the thought of baking with this stuff EVER again. I also did some research and found that concentrated cherry juice is sold by heath food stores (and the online the web from http://www.brownwoodacres.com) and is intended as a supplement for joint pain, but the list of ingredients is still only one thing: Montmorency Tart cherry juice. I happily purchased both cherry items and eagerly awaited their arrival on my doorstep to test in baking. Finally they arrived, and I quickly got to work making a white cake containing the concentrated cherry juice and rehydrated cherry pieces that I cut into smaller pieces in hopes they would not sink to the bottom. I whipped this up, and tasted the batter… and DAMN it was good! But of course, I couldn’t let it be! I went and added 1/8 tsp of the cherry extract…1/8 tsp! Hardly ANYTHING! I tasted the batter… eh… too early to tell. Certainly tasted like cherries, but was it a good cherry flavor?

Finally it was done and I rushed to try it. It tasted like a fake cherry factory exploded in the cake. Andreas tasted it, and even he, my reliable cake testing guinea pig told me he felt like he was going to be sick. So I guess adding the natural cherry extract produced a flavor of anything but? And, all with 1/8th a tsp!! In the end, I didn’t have the heart to bring the sample cake to work, for my co-workers/taste testers to only belittle my cake-making self esteem even more, or worse, make them too feel nauseous. The cake instead found a home in the garbage, and I chalked it up to a ‘learning experience.’

But, despite this cake going extremely wrong, it seemed easy to fix. Don’t add any of the cherry extract. In addition, the cherry juice is made from tart cherries, so I thought my next (and what I was pretty convinced would be my last!) test cake should have an increased amount of sugar to balance the tartness of the juice. Additionally, to keep the pieces of rehydrated dried cherries far away from the bottom of my cake pan, I decided I would dredge the chopped up cherries in cake flour before lightly mixing them into the finished batter. I excitedly made this cake, promised Andreas it would be good, and we both tried it. I am proud to say it was the best cherry cake I’ve ever eaten, and being a person who prefers fruit to chocolate, this is one of my most favorite cakes I have ever eaten. Even Andreas, who eternally will prefer chocolate cake to anything else, agreed it was delicious and should be tried by all. My co-workers/taste testers all agreed, and it is with that I share probably my most prized recipe yet with you… and I daresay it was well earned after all those sample cakes!

Cherry Cake
1 stick butter, softened
2 cups sugar
2 tsp almond extract
½ cup Montmorency cherry juice (http://www.brownwoodacres.com)
4 egg whites
1½ cup milk (I use half ½ and ½, half 1% milk)
2 ½ cups cake flour
1 tblsp baking powder
pinch salt
½ cup – 1 cup dried Monmorency cherries, rehydrated in water and dredged in cake flour

Cream butter and sugar with a mixer until light and fluffy and then some – approximately 3 minutes. Add the cherry juice and the almond extract, beating thoroughly. In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg whites and the milk/½ and ½. In another separate bowl, combine all dry ingredients and mix well. Add 1/3 of the dry ingredients to the butter/sugar/juice mixture, and mix until incorporated. Add half of the wet ingredients and mix until incorporated, scraping the sides of the bowl as needed. Add half of the remaining dry ingredients and again mix until incorporated. Add the last half of the wet ingredients, mixing until incorporated. Lastly, add the remaining dry ingredients and mix until incorporated, and then mix for an extra few minutes at the end. In a small, microwave safe bowl, add dried cherries and cover with water. Cook for a few minutes in the microwave to rehydrate, drain cherries, and cut into smaller pieces (each cherry, maybe 4 pieces). Towel dry cherry pieces, and then mix with cake flour to coat. Add cherries to the cake batter and lightly stir in with a spoon. Pour batter into cake pans prepared by spraying with nonstick cooking spray (or rubbed in butter) and coated with a light layer of cake flour. Bake in a preheated oven set to 350 degrees F until a toothpick in the center comes out clean, approximately 30-35 minutes for a 10 inch round.

As you can see from the pictures, I made this cake a two-layer cake (as pictured, the purple and green cake), where each layer was made from two cake rounds. This cake recipe makes two 10 inch rounds. I doubled this recipe to make the cake as pictured. After the rounds cooled, I filled them with cherry preserves and iced them with a chocolate-cherry buttercream frosting before covering in fondant.

Even though this cake calls on the use of an unusual ingredient – Montmorency tart cherry juice – this recipe is well worth the time and effort it takes to acquire this product, and you won’t be disappointed. Enjoy!