sour cherry chocolate cake

sour cherry chocolate cake

• 22 Jul 2013

I've had some dried sour cherries lingering in the cupboard for about a year. I also have a half used bottle of morello cherries in my fridge. I don't like to waste food so I was looking for a recipe which contained both sour cherries and chocolate. Apart from Black Forest Cherry Cake there are surprisingly few sour cherry chocolate cake recipes on the internet so I decided to come up with my own. I used my old faithful Margaret Fulton chocolate sandwich cake recipe as the starting point, but apart from using jam dissolved in boiling water, everything else is different from the original.



I just love cherries and even though it's not cherry season in Sydney the Washington cherries we get in the supermarket are so nice I can't resist them. I know the food miles involved are horrendous but fresh cherries aren't an integral part of the recipe - I only bought a few for decoration.



I've made the cake twice now, once using dried sour cherries reconstituted in hot water and on the second occasion I used bottled sour cherries drained and halved. I actually prefer the bottled cherries as they're not as sweet as the dried cherries.



The cake is a simple chocolate butter cake that uses dutch process cocoa and berry jam for it's colour and flavour. It could be cherry jam but otherwise any berry jam like raspberry jam will do just fine.



I tweaked the recipe a bit between the first and second version mainly by increasing the cocoa content to make the cake more chocolatey to match the wickedly dark chocolate ganache topping.



I mean, can anything be too chocolatey? Here's the recipe for you. This quantity makes one small bundt cake. For a 21 cm bundt cake, double the ingredients, but keep the cooking time the same.

Ingredients
125 g unsalted butter, softened
⅓ cup caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
¾ cup self raising flour
¼ cup plain flour
3 (20 ml) tablespoons dutch process cocoa
1 tablespoon cherry or raspberry jam blended with sufficient boiling water to make ½ cup, then set aside to cool.
⅓ cup sour cherries, drained and halved or 30 gm coarsely chopped dried sour cherries soaked in hot water for 1 hour then drained.

Topping
75 gm chocolate (I used a combination of milk chocolate and 70% dark chocolate)
75 mls cream
Optional - fresh cherries

Preheat the oven to 190°C. Grease and flour a small bundt tin. I use a 1 tablespoon each of flour and cocoa, sifted if there are any lumps, to avoid getting white flour marks on the sides of the cake.

Sift the flours and cocoa together into a small bowl and set to one side. In a medium size bowl, combine the softened butter, caster sugar and vanilla and beat until light and creamy. Mix in the egg and a spoon of the flour if the mixture starts to look curdled. Mix in the flour alternately with the jam mixture to make a smooth, soft batter. Gently fold in the sour cherries before spooning the batter into the prepared tin.

Bake on the centre rack in the oven for 35 – 40 minutes until the cake tests cooked when a skewer is inserted. Remove the tin from the oven and allow the cake to cool for abut 15 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack. Allow the cake to completely cool before decorating.

Chocolate Ganache
Chop the chocolates into small pieces and place in a small bowl. Heat the cream in a small saucepan or in the microwave until just below boiling point. Pour the cream over the chocolate and allow the mixture to sit for about 10 minutes until the chocolate melts. Stir until the mixture until smooth then set to one side for about 20 minutes until the ganache has thickened.

Drizzle the ganache over the cooled cake, then decorate with the fresh cherries, if desired. Serve the cake at room temperature.



I hope you enjoy the recipe. 

Bye for now,

Jillian