Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Tuesdays With Dorie (and Jennifer): Berry Surprise Cake



Jennifer (Keep Passing Open Windows) and I collaborated on the Berry Surprise Cake for our Tuesdays with Dorie assignment. This recipe was chosen by Mary Ann of Meet Me In The Kitchen and can be found on pages 273-275 of Baking, From My Home To Yours.

I could tell the recipe looked difficult. That was before I read the 60+ comments in which many of my TWD colleagues described cakes that fell flat, or turned out like rocks, even after second attempts. I was relieved and excited that Jennifer invited me over to bake this cake together and play Wii. I looked up the correct pronunciation of genoise, picked up some Framboise, and headed to her house for a berry delightful afternoon. (For some reason I had Strawberry Shortcake in the back of my mind all afternoon.)


At the liquor store, I just went and picked up a bottle of the only Framboise I knew about, Framboise Lambic, which I knew was a fermented raspberry beverage. In hindsight, I'm not sure that this was what Dorie meant by Framboise. From Wikipedia, "This framboise article concerns a fruit beer. Framboise is also a French raspberry eau-de-vie, or clear brandy distilled from fermented fruit." Hmmm, I think that sounds more appropriate to this recipe. So that was probably the first mistake of the day, one I feel particularly stupid about, since I am a bartender.



There were a few other things we didn't do exactly per the recipe. It called for an 8 inch springform pan, and we only had 9 inch or larger ones. So we used a 9 inch pan. There were little things like adding too much cream cheese to the filling and adding the liquor a little too soon to the syrup. We had read about other people over mixing and used a very light hand to fold the dry ingredients into the wet, so we did have a few little flour clumps.


We thought we beat the eggs enough. We thought we got them to the ribbon stage. We thought we treated them like the divas they are, but apparently Jennifer and I do not know how to treat divas.

So, we couldn't cut a half inch off the top and hollow out the middle for the berry surprise. We just put the berry surprise in the sunken middle of our cake and put the topping over it. We had a drink,

ate some cake,


and played some Wii.


Actually, Jennifer kicked my ass in bowling and boxing. So I thought I would post her picture looking like the Peculiar Purple Pie Man of Porcupine Peak. Yah-tah-tah-tah-tah-tah-tah-tah, tah-tah-tah-tah! Cha! I love her.

13 comments:

spike. said...

your color/decoration choice is perfect for today!

Danielle said...

LMAO at least you guys had a great time. I am sorry your cake didnt turn out like you had hoped.

Anonymous said...

At least you had fun baking it. My cake flopped!

chocolatechic said...

Cake looks wonderful.

Welcome to our crazy blessed life said...

What a fun night of collaboration! You can't beat baking and with a friend and playing the Wii! :)

Anonymous said...

It looks awesome and I bet it tasted great regardless of how it turned out compared to the instructions.

Flourchild said...

Ha you looked so cute playing the wii..I love your blog! My cake was a flop but tasty. Your cake is great!

Cathy said...

I love the collaborative effort! Half the time I have no idea what these various ingredients are, or how to pronounce them. It looks like you two had a great time anyway!

dharmagirl said...

ooh! your cake looks delicious! i like how you capture the fun of baking:)

Cooking for Comfort by Jennifer said...

Looks like you had lots of fun! Beautiful job on the cake!

LyB said...

Looks like you had fun with this! Your cake looks great. :)

Pamela said...

Great post! Well, at least you guys had fun, right? The cake looks good!

Anonymous said...

It appears that your cork is not at the proper angle on the wine opener. Instead of the called for 180 degrees, it appears to be at about 179 1/2 degrees to the naked eye. Perhaps that was the problem with the cake. Air must enter the bottle in the proper way...