Technical Bake: Mary Berry’s Cherry Cake

It’s Time to Get Technical!

I can sure take a screen cap, can’t I? From the Masterclass Episode.

I used to consider myself a fairly proficient home baker. My favorite part of getting a party invitation has always been considering what kind of delectable baked treat I can make to impress my friends and distract them from how socially awkward I am. But I’ve always relegated myself to drop cookies or cupcakes, putting more thought into marginally inventive flavor combinations rather than fiddly decorations. I also have generally stuck to recipes that use all-purpose flour, because I feared having barely used sacks of aging flour just hanging out getting stale and taking up cupboard space. I’ve never done pastry, I’ve never done a yeasted bread, and I was content with that. And then I watched The Great British Bake Off.

Since the The Great British Bake Off bubbled up on my Netflix homescreen, under the American title of The Great British Baking Show, I’ve watched and re-watched the four available seasons much to the frustration of the Netflix algorithm, I’m sure. (“Again, Lisa? But I make such brilliant suggestions!”) Watching these “home bakers” produce an insane variety of impressive bakes under such tremendous pressure blew my mind. I was suddenly motivated to whack something in the oven, slap some gluten into dough, and hold a meringue over my head!

But one doesn’t simply knock out a brilliant showstopper like Christine’s shortbread Bavarian Clock Tower or Nadiya’s chocolate peacock after making only drop cookies and cupcakes. I need to diversify my baking skills and work myself up to Star Baker of my own kitchen. That’s how I got the idea of working my way through the GBBO Technical Bakes one by one, starting with Mary Berry’s Cherry Cake.

Why this cake to pop my technical bake cherry? (Ooh! Sue would be chuffed with that one!) Because it is the first technical bake for Nancy, Richard, Martha, Chetna and the other bakers in Episode 1 of Series 5, which for those of us across the pond is Season 1. My parameters on myself will be very different than those competitors, in that I’m giving myself literally every advantage. First and foremost, I’m going to have the complete recipe. I’m aspiring to making something worthy of the Gingham Altar of The Great British Bake Off, not Netflix’s American baking competition show Nailed It! (As much as I love comedian/host Nicole Byer, I’m morally opposed to that show on so many levels.) I’m also going to aspire to keep to the time and I’ll report honestly if I made the bake in time or not, but I’m going to keep baking the damn thing until it’s edible. I’m not in this to create food waste, though I know I’ll probably end up rage-binning a fail or two. (Like Iain’s Baked Alaska! Heartbreak!) I’m also going to re-watch the eps and take copious notes so hopefully I can avoid the pitfalls stumbled upon by the contestants who did these challenges in earnest.

The Brief: Mary Berry’s Cherry Cake

Sexy topographical cake shot from the Masterclass episode.

Our queen, Mary Berry, chose this particular cake over all other for the kick-off of season five, “It’s a great British classic, but it’s quite tricky to get right.” It all comes down to the jewels of that baked golden crown, the cherries. They have to be perfectly suspended in the cake and not all gathered at the bottom or off in one spot. Then there is is the lemon icing that needs to be the correct consistency so that it can create gentle drizzles down the side of the light golden brown cake. The bakers have 2 hours. I’ll give myself 2 hours and 11 minutes to make up for my slow, conventional oven, which I’ll get into later.

I pulled the recipe from the Great British Bake Off: Masterclass Series 1: Episode 1 in which Ms. Berry herself walked her humble viewers through this recipe.

Shopping List

Most of the tools and ingredients I either had or could get from my regular grocery store. There were a few items, however, that I had to order online or, in the case of ground almonds, improvise at the last moment.

• The Food Scale. British recipes call for their dry ingredients to be weighed rather than using graduated cups and spoons. I poked through amazon reviews before landing on this one – the Etekcity Digital Touch Kitchen Scale.
• The Ring Mold. Mary called for a 23 cm ring mold. I did not want to settle for a bundt pan because I liked the aesthetic of the smooth ring of cake. I ended up getting a 9.75” savarin mold.
• The Glacé Cherries. I wasn’t sure if a grocery store would carry these on the regular, so I just bought these from amazon.
• Caster sugar. American grocery stores carry hardly anything beside granulated and powdered white sugar. Caster sugar is a finer sugar without going full powder. I bought this on amazon, though my British friend told me later that she often buys super fine Domino’s sugar for her British baking, which is kept by the coffee and tea.
• Ground Almonds. For some reason, I thought I would be able to find ground almonds in a sack in the baking aisle of the grocery store. Silly me! I went to three different grocery stores, and while I found almond flour and almonds in all forms, but no ground almonds. I ended up buying blanched silvered almonds and then grinding them in my magic bullet. I ran them through a medium sieve to get the big almond chunks out.

My beautifully ground almonds! Like a sandy beach of yummy ingredientness.

On Your Mark, Get Set… Bake!

WTFan??!! Watching the show, they would declare oven temp using the term “fan.” And I’m all like, what the F is fan? Some quick googling around revealed that “Fan” refers to turning the fan on in your fancy-pants convection oven. Well, my pants are quite ordinary and the air in my oven is still as a tomb, so what’s an amateur baker to do? The answer is math. Let me get my pencil from behind my ear… oh wait, I’m not Richard!

It turns out that a Fan-assisted, or convection, oven lowers your oven temperature by 25° and decreases your cooking time by a third. There are LOTS of sites that help you convert recipes for a conventional oven into a recipe for a convection oven but us standard oven plebes are on our own. Mary Berry called for “160 Fan” for her Cherry Cake. I converted it from Celsius to Fahrenheit by asking Siri which comes to 320°. I then added the 25° to make up for my lack of Fan. So my bake temp was going to be 345° F. Mary said the bake time was to be around 35 minutes, so I increased the bake time by 33% and got 46 minutes. Boom. Simple! It didn’t take an aerospace engineer after all.

Prepare the Cherries. Our fine bakers in the tent were a bit baffled by how, exactly, to prepare the cherries, which was the crux of the entire bake. “Does she mean wash or does she mean cut? Well, I’m going for cut,” Jordan decided. Well, cut he did, chopping those poor cherries into oblivion so that they seemed to dissolve into his cake. Poor Claire and Richard left their cherries far too large so they all sunk to the bottom of the tin.

In the Masterclass episode Mary, revealed the secret of her suspended cherries, which is fourfold – cut, wash, dry, and coat. Paul Hollywood was aghast when Mary instructed him to quarter the 200 grams of sticky cherries, but I rather enjoyed the task. I would just line my little cherries up three like soldiers, then cut them in half, then line up the six halves and cut them again. Only after cutting them did I wash the syrup off, because Mary was very clear that if I washed before I cut the syrup released from the center of the fruit during cutting would be my undoing. After I rinsed them and dried them with a kitchen towel, I borrowed a tablespoon from my 225 g of self-rising flour to coat the cherries.

These cherries are as prepared as they’ll ever be!

All-In-One Method. It doesn’t get much easier than dumping all of the ingredients into a bowl and mixing them together. Mary used a stand mixer in her masterclass, but I don’t have a stand mixer. The fancy Kitchenaid stand mixers are prohibitively expensive and take up valuable kitchen space, but deep down in my little bake-loving heart, I desperately want one. I’m sure I’ll find an excuse in later bakes to take the plunge, but for this bake Norman and Nancy both mixed by hand. Norman’s cake was a little dry, but Nancy’s cake was the winner (Surprise, surprise!) so I figured that how the ingredients came together wasn’t all that important. I just used my hand mixer until the ingredients just came together and then folded in the cherries.

In the lap of the Gods! Once I had all of the batter in the mold and leveled, I whacked my cake in the oven to bake. I tried to clean up my baking mess while I waited, but I couldn’t help but look through the window of my oven every few minutes to see how my little, sweet cherry baby was doing. About ten minutes into the bake, I saw that my cake had risen about an inch above the tin. Catastrophe! My savarin mold wasn’t quite as deep as the molds the bakers in the tent were using, and the self-rising flour was doing its thing. I couldn’t very well fix that cake while it was in the oven, so all I could do was watch it bake and worry.

I ended up taking out the cake at about 43 minutes, after checking for doneness with a wooden skewer. The bottom may have taken on a bit more color than it would have otherwise, but when I leaned into the take a sniff, Sue’s “very sexy sauna” style, I smelled some sweet, lemony goodness.

I’m baffled by my jaunty angle on this pic as well.

Flipping out. After letting the cake hang out on the counter for 10 minutes, and checking that the warm cake had pulled away from the side of the tin, I flipped my cake out. I could see a few of the cherries had sunk, and were revealing themselves like little embedded rubies, but I could also see some cherries peaking through the side of my cake, so I hoped that my cherries were well-distributed. I threw the cake in the fridge and got on with my toppings.

Jewels of cherry goodness or pox of sunken doom?

Ice, Ice, Baby! While my cake was in the fridge, I toasted my nuts, keeping my eye on them (Unlike Kate, who had to bin a pan of blackened nuts). I then got on making my icing. I’ve had some experience making a thick icing using citrus and icing sugar, and I’ve made the gamut from thin and runny to thick and gloopy. I’ve found the trick is to adding the liquid slowly and whisking so that the icing makes a thick ball of icing sugar that clings to the whisk. Continue whisking and adding liquid a half tablespoon at a time until there is enough liquid that the icing just lets go of the whisk. I don’t dare add another drop of juice after that. I find that that makes an icing that is pipe-able and not so thin that it gets lost in your cake.

When I had about ten minutes left, I took my cake out of the fridge. It was still barely warm, but I figured with the thickness of my icing, it was cool enough to decorate. Besides, I was racing the clock. I paused for but a moment, asking myself to pipe or not to pipe? Nancy piped her icing in a perfect zig-zag over her cake, which impressed the judges. Mary complimented that her impeccable ice-job “proves that she can do things with precision.” My piping skills would probably prove that I don’t practice my piping enough but I thought that if I cut my piping bag an inch or so in like Chetna did, I could control my icing more than if I spooned it on the cake like Mary did in the masterclass. Ultimately, I went with the spoon. 175 g of icing sugar didn’t look like a lot of icing to me, and I didn’t want to loose any of that white, tarty goodness in the piping bag.

Am I pleased with my icing job? Eh, no, but it was time to place the cherries. Some of the bakers halved their cherries while others left them whole a top their cake. Jordan, who failed to read the instructions and did not reserve the 5 cherries for the top of the cake, was out of luck.In the masterclass, Mary had Paul cut the five remaining cherries into eighths, much to his chagrin, and then place those on the cake. I decided to stay true to her method and stick the shiny, red crescents onto my cake. I then, Martha style, picked the most perfectly toasted and shaped almonds to adorn my cake.

Did I make time?? Um, technically no, but if I had Mel and Sue breathing down my neck giving my 5 minute warnings, I totally would have. My 2 hour 11 minute timer went off while I was placing my almonds.

The Gingham Altar

I, of course, don’t have Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood scrutinizing my bakes, but I presented Mary Berry Cherry Cake to my parents’ for dessert after Easter Dinner. Dinner was delicious, but all I could think was “are my cherries suspended, or aren’t they?”

My cake in a place of honor next to the other carbs! Bonus points if you can spot where Brad nicked an almond, the bastard.

Does it make the cut? The moment of truth! Time to slice the cake! How do you like them cherries? Little red gems perfectly suspended in yellow cake. Relief! Admittedly, not all of the slices were as perfect as that one. Perhaps in the scooping and leveling phase, I could have been more cognizant that I had even cherries in each scoop, but every slice had cherries, so I’m going to call that a success.

The actual cake was lemony and yummy. The icing is super tart, which is to my liking. The bake maaaaaay have been a bit dry, though I couldn’t get my parents and husband to admit it, but I think my simple little cherry cake would not have put me on the chopping block that week. I think I’d be somewhere in the middle with Kate around number 6. She also had a fine distribution of cherries but was also had a cake that was a bit dry. She did a neater icing job than me, but her almonds were a bit caught, so I could be somewhere between Kate and Diana.

I would have been nowhere near Nancy with her “perfect nuts” (“Wow! To be commended on your nuts by Mary Berry!” Gotta love Sue!) , I’m pretty pleased with my theoretical standing in my first technical bake. I was relieved at the finish. Like Luis, I wanted to exclaim “Come on, Diana! High five me!”

The Recipe: Mary Berry’s Cherry Cake

Tools

Food Scale

23 cm Ring Mold (9.75” Savarin Mold)

Cake Ingredients

200 g of Glace Cherries (Plus 5 for decorating)

225 g of Self-Rising Flour

175 g of Softened Butter

175 g of Caster Sugar

50 g of Ground Almonds

Zest of a Lemon

3 whole large eggs

Icing Ingredients

175 g of icing sugar

Juice of 1 Lemon, strained

Flaked/Sliced Almonds

1. Prep your oven and pan. Pre-heat your oven to 160 C fan (320 F fan, 345 degrees F in a conventional oven) and grease your tin with butter.
2. Prepare the Cherries. Quarter, rinse, and dry the cherries with a kitchen towel. Borrow a tablespoon of flour to coat the cherries.
3. All-In-One Method. Add softened butter, caster sugar, ground almonds, lemon zest, 3 large whole eggs. Combine ingredients until well combined into a stiff mixture.
4. Cherry time! Fold in cherries.
5. Put in tin. Scoop in mixture and level.
6. Bake! For about 35 (46 in conventional oven) minutes until it is well risen and a pale golden brown.
7. Cool, flip out, and cool. Let the cake cool in the tin for 10 minutes until the cake is shrinking from the sides, turn out the cake, and then let it cool completely.
8. Make icing. Slowly whisk juice into the icing sugar a little at a time until it is still thick but will drip down the side of the cake.
9. Toast almonds. On the stove in a dry pan on medium heat, stirring constantly until they are slightly brown and fragrant.
10. Decorate! Once the cake is entirely cooled, cut the remaining cherries into 8ths. Ice the cake thickly, encouraging it to drizzle down the side. Sprinkle on toasted almonds and cherry eighths.