Sour Cherry Cake

Spring is in the air, so says Meeta and so, we listened. A is ever-ready to bake. Always. Every night. And when I mentioned that Meeta had an event and we had to bake a cake. A sprang (no pun intended :D) upon the idea and raided the Farmer's Market for berries. While we went looking for berries, we came back with some cherries. We initially thought of baking Mahanandi's Chocolate Cherry cake- a winner of a recipe which has been tried and eaten umpteen number of times by me. A, very obviously, wanted to try out something else and also use our hardly used bundt/tube cake pan (I'm not even sure if that is what it is!)

The cake was moist, speckled with cherries, made for a great dessert after an Enchilada meal :D Here is the recipe. Its as easy as a cake can be!

Ingredients

1 c AP flour (set aside 2 tbsp separately to coat the cherries)
1/2 c chopped cherries
1/2 c + 2 tbsp sugar
2 eggs
1/4 c sour cream
1/4 c milk
5 tbsp butter
1/4 tsp b.soda
1/2 tsp b.powder

1. Preheat oven to 350 F

2. Melt the butter and allow it to cool. In a separate bowl, toss the cherries with 2 tbsp of flour.

3. In the meantime, beat the eggs, one at a time with an electric beater. After adding the third egg, add the sugar gradually and beat well at medium speed until creamy.

4. Add the melted butter slowly. Beat for another two minutes.

5. Whisk the sour cream and milk in a bowl. Sift the leavening agents and the flour alternately with sour cream/milk. If you still see lumps, take a whisk and beat the batter until they disappear.

6. Fold in the cherries gently. Do not beat.

7. Pour the batter into the fluted pan and bake for about 25 mins. or until a skewer comes out clean. Take it out of the oven immediately. Invert it on to a flat plate and let it cool completely.

8. Run a knife along the edges and try to pry it if it doesn't want to come out. This is exactly what happened with ours as the cherries sank to the bottom. But well, it still tasted good ;)

However, we had a couple of problems. One, the cake was REALLY soft and was tough to take out without breaking it! And two, though we dusted the cherries with flour per popular baking advice, they still sank to the bottom. There were a few in the middle of the cake too, but nothing on the top! We do realize that the more liquidy the batter is, the more the cherries sink. And thicker the batter, lesser they sink. But, still, we'd like to know if we should know something else about sinking berries or cherries!

Oh, like we mentioned, this goes to Meeta of What's for Lunch, Honey? for Monthly Mingle # 32. This month, we are celebrating the season's offerings! And this cake is a great cake for any and all sorts of berries. Do let us know if you try it! And hey, try it!

Simple and Citrusy!

Happy New Year to all of you! For everyone who left messages for us, thanks so much for remembering us! We've been away for a long long time now, and its been a difficult time. Job search during recession sucks is what I've learned in the past 4 months and decided to plunge into academics all over again after a good 5 years! And it did not help that I was on diet after diet to try to do something about my 2008 resolutions :P Of course, I have almost the same resolutions for 2009 also. Hopefully, this will be a lighter year on everything, literally ;)

A loves to have a dessert after every meal if possible. And especially after dinner. Thanks to our baking obsession, we bake something almost every single day. Lately, we stopped doing so thanks to a change in the weighing scales for me. It did not seem to affect him, strangely! However, we still have our days when we go crazy and bake at 10 PM in the night. This is one such lemony cake that we came up with two hours ago. It is now 12.56 AM! Thankfully, we baked an XS cake - super small in size but huge in flavour and the zing :) I love citrusy flavours and can never tire of them. A is not too fond of them, but then :P who is the life of our family? Me! So, we baked this cake for me and here you go, here is the recipe for a simple lemon cake!

Ingredients:

1 egg
1/4 cup +2 tbsp All-purpose flour or Cake flour
1/4 cup sour cream
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 cup + 2 tbsp sugar
Zest of 1 lemon
1 tbsp butter
1/2 tsp lemon essence
Pinch of salt

1. Beat the egg. Cream melted butter and sugar. Add this mixture to the beaten egg.

2. Add the baking powder and the baking soda

3. Add sour cream and beat one more time

4. Fold in lemon zest and the lemon essence

5. Fold in the flour little by little. Sift the flour if it is AP flour. Cake flour can be added as it is. Do NOT overbeat/mix.

We poured it into a 4 inch (1 inch deep) ramekin making the cake small, just enough for the two of us- a late night lemon-sweet craving :) This cake is fairly light too because it needs just 1tbsp butter and we used fat-free sour cream! So, there! Keeping up with the resolutions and all that ;)

It is quite citrusy and comes out beautifully moist and a fresh yellow in colour. We had ours with some warm blackberry sauce. We had some blackberry-raspberry preserve that we added some hot water to, and thinned it to bring it to a sauce-like consistency. While the cake was mildly sweet, the sweetness of the blackberry sauce added a new dimension to the cake. I loved the mild sweetness and preferred the lemony zing in the cake. You could add more sugar if you wish!

This piece of cake specifically goes out to Nags :) for encouraging to come back to blog all over again. Thanks man!