The Cherry Cake Challenge

I thought I would be starting out with a nice and easy recipe. I mean, come on, it’s a cherry cake. How hard can it be? After finding and reading the appropriate recipe, I knew I was in for a treat.

the first step was to convert all of the measurements from grams to cups. I should probably invest in a food scale at some point if this ends up being a typical occurrence.

after that was done, I found a few items on the list that I had no idea what they were talking about. Red glacé cherries? Self raising flour? Caster sugar? Ground almonds? Little had I known before this challenge that the British folk tend to call things a little differently than us and may have products available to them that we Americans do not.

A quick couple of minutes on Google and I found The that the glacé cherries are the candied cherries found in fruitcake. Check. Self raising flour is not typically found in your average grocery store, but I had found a website that said for every cup of all-purpose flour to add 2 tsp of baking soda and 1/2 tsp of salt. sweet! Double check. Caster sugar, believe it or not, is super fine grain sugar. This is labeled as such on the bag. Easy peasy! Now…ground almonds…I will have to admit that I didn’t read the recipe closely enough and had assumed that it just said almonds…which I thought I had. I didn’t…so I skipped this step. I mean, c’mon, it only asked for 1 3/4 oz of the darn thing.

Fun fact: British “large” egg is the equivalent to the American “extra large” egg. Who knew!?

It’s a great British classic, but it’s quite tricky to get absolutely right. Sometimes, the cherries all go to the bottom. So, they got to do the right preparation of the cherries…And also, if you do the icing too watery, it’ll run off. It’s got to just gently trickle down.”

~Mary Berry (Season 1, episode 1 Great British Baking Show)

The bakers were given two hours to complete the challenge.

The trickiest part in preparing the cake was to ensure that the cherries were completely dried. Otherwise, they will sink to the bottom. Of course, these type of cherries are swimming in a sickly sweet syrup and it didn’t go without a fight. When the cherries were dried to my satisfaction, they received a coating of 2 Tbsp of flour and then were gently folded into the batter. Crossing my fingers that they remained suspended as the cake baked.

I set the timer for 35 minutes and plopped down in front of the oven to watch. The tension is real. I was nervous at this point because it didn’t seem like a lot of batter went into the bunt pan. I was hoping it rose more in the oven.

when the 35 minutes were up, I cautiously opened the oven. The middle part of the cake seemed to have risen more than the edges. The edges themselves were a rather darker brown than the rest of the cake. A toothpick confirmed that the bake was done.

Now it was the moment of truth; turning the cake out of the pan. I was happy that it slid out easily enough, however, the product was lacking in…height. It rose some but not enough. I had only to let it cool before applying the icing. The hard part was over! Or so I thought…

“Icing sugar” is British for “powdered sugar” or “confectioners sugar”. When I went to the store the previous day, I was confident that I had enough sugar for the icing. All I needed was lemon juice. That all proved to be wrong when I had used the last of the sugar and the icing was still watery and not the correct pure white color. However, I found a substitute! With help from my husband, we pulsed 1 cup of regular sugar with 1 tsp of cornstarch until it resembled powdered sugar. I added a couple more Tbsps of sugar until I assumed it was ready to be drizzled on the cake.

Drizzle it did…all the way down the sides of the cake and into the sink.the icing that stayed on the cake resembled a slightly white glaze. Which is not at all attractive. The solution? Make more icing and try to cover up the first layer. The second round of icing was thicker, but still too runny. Mary Berry would be so disappointed…

One last hope remained of an otherwise failed challenge: Were the cherries suspended in the cake?

No…they were not. The blasted things all sank to the bottom of the bunt pan.

The plus side is that the cake itself was pretty tasty, if not super sweet.

Challenge #1 Mary Berry’s Cherry Cake: Fail

Time: 4 hours

Next Challenge: Florentines

Give this challenge a try! Send me pics of your finished products on my Instagram (@what_a_piece_of_cake) or on my Facebook page Piece of Cake. 

Mary Berry’s Cherry Cake