I’ve already been back at work for over two weeks now but for our school training day at the very beginning of the year we always have a shared lunch.  As I love baking I always bring in the pudding or some cake.  This time as normal I brought along some peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies and a cake.  The cake was one I’d been wanting to bake for a couple of weeks now, ever since it was the Technical Challenge in the first week of this year’s Great British Bake Off! So Mary’s Cherry Cake it had to be!

For the link to Mary’s own recipe you can find it here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/marys_cherry_cake_17869

In the Bake Off it was lovely to see the cakes baked in ring tins and I thought that one of my Nordicware Bundt pans would be perfect for the job.  My bundt pans are my new obsession and I can’t wait to add to the collection when I can afford it.  So I got out my heart shaped one, greased it carefully and got on with the baking.

More often than not my cherries sink to the bottom of my cakes.  I try to rinse them carefully but I’ve since found out that taking a couple of tablespoonfuls of flour out of the total amount and tossing the cherries in it works well to stop the sinking.  I realised also if I needed to halve or quarter the cherries I should really rinse off the sticky syrup after cutting them as you end up with the stickiness on the inside too! Maybe that was another reason why my cherries sank!

All the other ingredients were simply weighed out and mixed together in one large bowl. Self raising flour, caster sugar, butter, eggs, along with a delicate flavour of grated lemon zest and a small amount of ground almonds.  I was pleased about that, almonds always go really well with cherries.

The cake was meant to stay in the oven for about 35-40 minutes.  I found this was ample time for the cake and thankfully it rose well inside my bundt tin.  I always feel nervous when turning out a cake from its tin, especially so with a shaped cake.  But I can honestly say I don’t have any trouble with Nordicware bundt pans so long as you spray the tin with Dr Oetker Cake Release first!

While the cake was cooling it was time to make the icing.  I mixed up icing sugar and the juice of one lemon to make a glace icing.  I think my lemon made a lot of juice as the icing was very runny and I ended up having to add twice as much icing sugar than was asked to make the icing thick enough.  It was still runny though but I didn’t mind that as I wanted it to trickle down the sides of the heart in the grooves.  When I’d done this I added some halved cherries and some flaked almonds to decorate the top.  Hey presto, it was finished and ready to take along to work.

My cake went down well at the training day.  There wasn’t much left the next day, although I did manage to have a small slice myself.  I love cherry cake so I know I’ll be having another go at this in the future.

Happy Baking!

Love Sam xx