Chocolate-Cherry Cake

This cake is a very easy and quick bread-like cake (only the baking time is longer). The cherries give it some nice taste, and what can go wrong with the combination of chocolate and cherries? Just don't use Marachino cherries for this cake! They are candied, and too sweet, not good for this recipe!

In contrast to many breads, this one uses oil and buttermilk/milk, and is an all-in-batter. An all-in-batter is more liquid, and doesn't have to be stirred as much as a traditional sweet bread batter. It's more like a muffin batter. Although the recipe says to use an electric hand mixer to mix the ingredients, oil and milk make it liquid enough, so you could just stir it by hand.

Ingredients:

One baking pan (8 x 8 Pyrex form) or 10 x 5 (25 x 11 cm, Kastenform) baking pan

Some grease and flour for the pan

For the batter:

One jar sour cherries (Morello Cherries, Trader Joe's)

200 g flour

2 packages chocolate pudding (Dr. Oetker) or JELL-O cook and serve (1.5 oz)

2 leveled teaspoons baking powder

100 g sugar

1 package vanilla sugar or some vanilla aroma

5 eggs

150 ml oil

125 ml buttermilk (I used regular milk)

100 g chocolate, finely ground

For the topping:

100 g chocolate

1 teaspoon oil

Or

150 g powdered sugar

2 tablespoons of the cherry juice

Or

Powdered sugar

Preparation:

1. Grease baking pan, coat with some flour. Preheat oven to 180 degree Celsius (350 F).

2. Drain cherries well, collect juice. Mix flour, pudding powder and baking powder in a bowl. Add sugar, vanilla sugar or vanilla aroma, eggs, oil, and milk and beat with an electric hand mixer until mixed. 

3. Carefully fold in sour cherries and ground chocolate. Pour batter into pan and bake in preheated oven at 180 degree Celsius (350 F) for about one hour or until toothpick comes out clean.

4. Remove cake from oven and let cool for about 10 min, remove from pan and put on a cooling rack.

5. For the topping: Melt chocolate with oil on top of a stovetop pot filled with water while constantly stirring or melt chocolate in microwave, then stir in oil. Coat cake with chocolate, let cool then serve. Alternatively, mix powdered sugar with two tablespoons of cherry juice, then coat cake or just sift some powdered sugar on top of cake.

Comments:

1. I recently tried a brownie made with coconut flour, which I didn't even know could be used for baking. The coconut and chocolate flavor went very well together, and I think it might work well with this recipe, too. Since coconut flour is gluten-free, one might very well make a gluten-free version of this cake, something I will certainly try in the near future.

2. I made this cake recently and used 20% of coconut flour. Exchanging that amount of wheat for coconut flour is easy and doesn't require any adjustments to the recipe. I found the modified cake to be very moist, but the coconut flavor was not as strong as I was hoping for, so I need to try the cake with more coconut flour, but then the recipe will need to be adjusted to make up for the loss of gluten.