Baking Beyond Borders: Cake Week: Mary Berry's Cherry Cake

We are beginning our technical bake off across 3 different countries with Mary Berry’s Cherry Cake. Mary Berry describes this cake as “a lovely cherry sponge with a little extra texture from the ground almonds,” which sounds so poetic.

The American way to describe this cake is a lemon cherry almond bundt cake because well we just give it to you straight without the added fluff (who has time for fluff when you need to get back to scrolling through Instagram). If we had our way then we would have Mary write these blog posts because clearly every word would be dripping with sophistication and class. Since Mary hasn’t returned our e-mails, we must forge ahead telling you about our cake and candied cherries instead of our lovely sponge and glacé cherries (we will try to insert these more sophisticated terms throughout our technical blog posts as we want to try and make Mary proud).

So here is the first step on our journey of ten technical challenges. We had some mishaps and some successes but in the end we seemed to realize that the Brits have simple recipes which need to be executed precisely in order to get that perfect result. You will get to see how our ingredients varied between each country and how our stand in Mary Berry’s and Paul Hollywood’s rated us.

This first technical led to many chats which ranged from discussing how legitimate yellow and green cherries are, to math (since America has to be difficult by not using grams as a standard for measurement). Glacé cherries were discussed at length and had to be homemade by two of us who don’t live with the convenience of American specialty stores. We laughed over mallets being used to ground almonds and cried over broken sponges (cakes for you Americans reading) and burnt almonds (no tears were actually shed during this baking process but almonds were definitely harmed).

First Baker: Megan

My thoughts: This cake seemed super simple to make because the directions were literally to just throw everything into a bowl and mix it, then add your floured cherries. Making those glace cherries on the other hand was a long process that made me dream of the convenience of hopping in my car and driving to the glorious land of Publix. I also love finding random gems here in Kiev such as yellow maraschino cherries. so when I found them I just had to buy them in order to candy them for this cake. All in all, any dessert that is not chocolate, is not worth the calories in my opinion, so this was not the cake for me. I did think though that the contrast of the sour lemon with the sweet cherries and nuttiness of the almonds made for a well balanced sponge.

My Ukrainian ingredients including those lovely yellow cherries, my mess of a kitchen in the process and the unfrosted sponge

Result:

Fake Paul and Mary thoughts: The judges thought it was a little dense (which I attributed to the almonds but maybe I over mixed it) but that the fruit was evenly distributed and it was refreshing. One judge was craving Stollen (German bread with candied fruit) the day before, and after having this cake their craving was satisfied so that seemed like a win to me.

Best Review

Average Taste Score: 8

Average Appearance Score: 7

Second Baker: Stephanie

My Thoughts: Right off the bat we have a recipe that required a little more work since I'm in a Bosnian kitchen. I had to make my own glace cherries (glorified maraschino cherries), ground my own almonds and caster sugar, and make my own version of self-rising flour. Phew. But everything else was relatively simple. I think I made a mistake when adding the baking powder right before tossing the butter on top of it, so it didn't incorporate, and I didn't get a good rise at all! There was some crumbling of the cake, and some gloopiness of icing, and a complete lack of desire to slice and toast almonds, that made me realize I need to really concentrate on my presentation next week. I was, however, pretty blown away by the flavor. It was the perfect amount of lemon, and I loved it!

(Leftover homemade cherry syrup, cake ready to go in, broken/unrisen cake, and starting ingredients)

Result:

Fake Paul and Mary Thoughts: My Paul is my hard to please husband, Craig. He said this was one of the top 5 favorite things I've ever baked for him! He also loved getting to comment on the "sponge" which he thought was a little dry, but said overall it was not too sweet, not too tart, and the perfect amount of lemon. My other judge said it's " a 10/10 for what it is but I don't have a lot to compare it to." We need to work on expanding these judges horizons.

Average Taste Score: 8.5

Average Appearance Score: 6

Third Baker: Devin

My Thoughts: Everything about this recipe seemed relatively simple and straightforward... until I actually started the bake. For the record this is my first cake made from scratch. It was exciting but a little overwhelming. Thank heavens I just recently watched all of the episodes so they are still fresh in my mind. It started simply enough but as I started mixing the texture of the cake seemed so odd. Then it hit me.... I had left out the eggs. If emojis were allowed in sophisticated blogs, right now would be when I posted the lady slapping her face. Once that was corrected, everything seemed right in the world until I remembered there was absolutely no zest in the cake. I'm definitely on the bottom for this week. Overall, I'm just happy that I didn't pull an Iain.

Notice there are no eggs in the bottom picture of ingredients

Result: The Cherry Cake made it safely to work. It was much smaller than it should have been, but the cherries were dispersed nicely and you could taste the almonds clearly. I believe it didn't rise to the occasion because of the missing egg issue.

Fake Paul and Mary's Thoughts: The sponge is delightful, but definitely on the dense side and I'm not getting any hints of the lemon. The cherries could have been smaller and I believe the icing was put on prematurely. Overall, it's alright.

Average Taste Score: 6