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.