Our friends invited us to dinner at their house tonight, and asked us to bring dessert because they get really excited about what I make (always a great feeling). The weather was not that great, so I set to work finding a recipe I could make with what I already had, with the added challenge to make it nut free because one of their children is very allergic to peanuts. I started looking through my backlog of recipes to try, and found Not Quite Nigella's Sunken Sour Cherry Cake. I remembered I had a container of frozen sour cherries, and once I verified that I had enough to make the cake I got to work. I made it nearly exactly as written. I used a pound of frozen cherries in juice (hooray for sour cherries being a local crop for me!). The only thing I did differently was add both vanilla and rum.
I realize this is a German/European recipe where cakes tend to be less sweet and perhaps more dry than Americans might be used to. The cake was a good amount of sweet for me, but seemed a bit dry and didn't taste enough like cherries for my liking. Eating it with whipped cream was nice, but my favorite idea was reducing the sweetened juice the cherries were packed in, poking holes in the top of the cake, and spooning it over the cake just before eating it. A combination of whipped cream and this syrup would be especially tasty I think. I also think it goes incredibly well eaten alongside a cup of coffee or tea. The texture reminded me of an American coffee cake.
If I make this again, I would use fresh cherries and put more cherries in (frozen cherries likely had less moisture since I had to drain them) and maybe mix the cinnamon sugar into the cake batter.
RECIPE: Sunken Sour Cherry Cake
