I might be a geek who likes to fiddle with computers and electronics, but I also like food. And what better way to spend some alone time creating stuff in kitchen. I’ve been cooking “normal” meals for few years without any recipes, just what I’ve eaten in the past and try to extrapolate what ingredients to use and how to prepare it to get that same end result. It’s quite fun figuring out what to use without knowing the ingredients or the whole actual process of making it. But I always had this fear with desserts because they are a lot more unforgiving, especially stuff that involves biscuit batter. Mix it wrong and you’ll get a dense pancake, bake it for too long and you’ll burn it or make it crunchy like a cookie etc. But I’m starting to get a hang of this too. I’ve made it last week and I messed something up and it was too dense, baked it for too long, didn’t use enough fruit and didn’t moist the biscuit enough. But 2 days ago, I’ve done it. With perfection. This will be more as an archive for myself so I can do it in the future again, but if anyone wants to try it out, awesome 🙂
Required ingredients
Ingredients suffice for a baking tray with dimensions of 37 x 28 x 5cm (14.5 x 11 x 2 inches). It’s what I used so predict it appropriately so it won’t overflow when baked.
- 7 eggs
- 150g (5.9oz) of flour
- 150g (5.9oz) of sugar
- 1 bag of baking powder (12g or 0.42oz)
- 4 bags of vanilla sugar (each 10g or 0.35oz)
- 1 bag of lemon sugar (10g or 0.35oz)
- 1 shot of rum
- 1400g (~50oz) of pitted sour cherry compote (2x 700g jars in my case)
- 500ml (17 fl oz) of whipping cream
- 4 tea spoons of cocoa powder
- bitter chocolate flakes
Instructions
Pre-heat the oven to 175°C (347°F) using both, top and bottom heater (so you won’t have to wait for it later).
Preparing fruits…
Separate all the sour cherries from the compote liquid and place the remaining liquid in the fridge to cool. I’ve added some cold water to it to make total of 1.5L (53 fl oz) of sour cherry juice because it was really strong and I like the biscuit juicy. Leave sour cherry fruit part at room temperature.
Making the batter…
Separate yolk from egg white and start mixing the yolks. While you’re mixing, continue adding 2 bags of vanilla sugar, 1 bag of lemon sugar, 1 baking powder, 150g of normal sugar and a shot (or two of rum). Mix till it becomes nicely smooth and sugar starts dissolving. Add 4 tea spoons of cocoa powder and mix it well. Now mix in 150g of flour and expect the batter to become very dense. I didn’t try, but I guess you could soften it up with a bit of butter, sweet cream or milk. It’ll get smoother again when you mix in whipped egg whites so don’t panic.
Foaming the egg white…
Now clean up the hand mixer whisks and start mixing egg whites at full speed in a separate bowl till it becomes nicely foamy and doesn’t seem to inflate any further. When that happens, dump it in the bowl with the yolky batter and use a large spoon and start mixing with the back of it (so it won’t stick so much inside of it). I made a mistake of using a whisk which just got clotted with dense batter and it was really hard to mix till it got smoother and softer batter again. When it gets a bit smoother, use a whisk to evenly mix it. Don’t use hand mixer, otherwise you’ll destroy the egg white foaminess (you need it for the biscuit to be fluffy in the end). Dump the batter into a baking tray, spread it evenly or shake the tray till it levels nicely.
Finishing the batter…
Take the sour cherry (fruit part) and spread it evenly across the batter. There is no specific rule for this, if you like sour cherry like I do, drop in tons of it, really thick. If you don’t like it that much, you can use less. They’ll sink into a batter so do it progressively across all surface so you’ll know where you dropped them already. Also, it’s fine if they sink, they don’t have to stay on top.
Baking…
Place the tray in a pre-heated oven and bake for 40 minutes (middle level).
Making that biscuit juicy…
When it’s done baking, place it on your cooking top and leave it to cool. When it has cooled a bit, drizzle it with sour cherry juice. A lot. Make it juicy. Just don’t overdo it, you don’t want your biscuit floating in it. If you don’t like very juicy biscuit, you can use less or none. It’s up to you. Sour cherry fruits will provide some moisture when you bite into it, but I like more so I use the juice too.
Finishing touches…
Now mix the whipping cream with 2 bags of vanilla sugar (you can also use same amount of normal sugar or none of it even but add some vanilla extract) and evenly spread it on top of the biscuit. Evenly sprinkle it with dark chocolate flakes. Place it in fridge till it thoroughly cooled (or if you used cold sour cherry juice you can serve it straight away).
Enjoy!
End result should be a very refreshing cake (or biscuit if you’re European 😛 ) that nicely blends bitter cocoa biscuit with sour cherry and sweet whipped cream on top. It may not look anything particularly fancy, but it tastes soooooooo good and because it’s juicy and fluffy, it’ll easily find it’s place in a tummy even after a substantial dinner. A perfect dessert in my book 🙂
If you decide to make it, let me know what you think of it 🙂
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