Guess who dropped out of grad school and signed up for a cake decorating class instead? This girl. No joke.
The cake I'm sharing today is the Cherry Chip Cake, another delight from
Vintage Cakes by Julie Richardson. This was actually the first cake I made from the book, and was right before the busiest time period I've ever had in my entire life. I'm glad I got to bake a cake first :)
So, cherry chip cake. I've always wondered why people choose eclectic flavors for things. It would just never dawn on me that I should make a non-standard cake flavor. I mean, cherry is totally a non-standard cake flavor, right?
This is probably the first time I've ever purchased cake flour, if you can believe that.
This cake was also the first time I ever used my food scale to weigh cake ingredients. I'm hooked on that now, because it seems so smart! I even weighed the batter in each pan to get even layers! I had a little panic when I realized I didn't have 3 8" cake pans. Luckily my springform was the right size. Accounted for in the weighing process, of course!!
The frosting for the cake was Cherry Buttercream, with a little bit of Kirschwasser, a colorless cherry brandy, mixed in. The recipe also calls for dried cherries to be reconsituted and mixed in to a basic buttercream recipe. I was happy that my boyfriend was able to find a tiny bottle so we don't have it sitting on the shelf for years and years.
I thought that the icing was a really gross brown tint from adding in the dried and reconstituted cherries. So I added some red food coloring to make the cake pink. Here are the before and after colors. Pink was a good call, right?
Not that it needed any more awesomeness, but to add some extra awesome in there anyway, each cake layer is topped with chocolate ganache. I didn't let it cool enough, which was a bit of a problem when I tried to put frosting between the layers. Luckily it didn't seem to matter too much. I worked it out.
Since this was prior to my cake decorating class, I wasn't schooled in the lessons of cake leveling, nor did I own a cake leveler. As evidenced here!
Actually, the leveling doesn't look too bad with the icing on there!
One of my baking traditions is to take a picture of myself making a 'bite face' with my cake. This cake led to the most epic, most amazing bite face ever.
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