TWD ~ Berry Not-So-Surprised Cake

I had a great plan for this recipe. I haven’t filled you in on some of my AWESOME Christmas presents, but I wanted to use one of these great, vintage, copper-colored, mini pans my Mom ebayed for me. One of these days I’ll get around to taking some pics and showing you what great taste my Mom has, that among the many other things I’ve been meaning to do for this blog! Mary Ann of  Meet Me in the Kitchen chose Dorie’s Berry Surprise Cake and I wanted to make two cakes, one in the quaint little mold I had and another in a regular cake pan.  

I read in this really great, but totally-not-helpful-in-this-particular-case book In The Sweet Kitchenby Regan Daley that if you measure the volume of the specified pan they used in the recipe then you can gauge how much batter, etc. is used and you can alter the pan based on that. “Substitute a pan with the same volume as the original…To find the volume of a given pan, fill it with water, then carefully pour the water into a measuring cup.” I have a 9″ springform pan and it’s around 2 3/4″ tall. This gave me about eight cups volume. According to this I should have had plenty of cake batter to execute my plan. So much for that idea. I do want to let everyone know that I really love this book, and the mistake was most likely mine. Instead of the “Berry Surprise Cake” I had to reveal the surprise and just cut the damn thing in half because there was no way there was enough cake to make any kind of surprise in the middle. It was a nice idea, oh well.

Putting aside my usual difficulties, this was a winner for me. The cake tasted just fine despite some oddities. Check this out…

“What the?!” is right. How the heck did I do that? I guess I didn’t fold the dry ingredients right. Still tasted good! I did slather a keg’s worth of syrup on the cake as you may be able to see, as it has actually soaked through

One thing though that I could just do without – cream cheese. My stomach simply cannot stomach cream cheese, in a cheesecake or in the filling for this cake. Oddly enough my stomach couldn’t be happier with anything but cream cheese when eating a bagel, go figure. I made the big round cake below with the filling as written and after the one slice I decided to just scrape it off future slices.

I finished the little cake with plain whipped cream and that was great. The combination of cake, berries, and whipped cream really hit the spot. I see this as a great summer dessert, wonderful for a picnic or backyard get-together. Some day I’ll have to give the surprise aspect a real shot.

Tagged as: Cream, Génoise, Raspberry, TWD