Cake, cherries, cake – no danger of the fruit dropping to the bottom of the sponge as this cake is lightly prebaked before cherries go on. Ingenious. Try your own variation with other stone fruit or berries.
Who enjoys pitting cherries?
Cherries are a chore if you want to use them in cooking: pitting them is a pretty loathsome job. Even if you have the specialist pitting tool which looks a little like an eyeball-gouger, the place is going to look like a serial killer’s residence.
And that’s with the common sweet cherries because morello or sour cherries are a different category entirely: Red Wedding or Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
How to pit cherries without a pitter?
A tip offering here: those eyeball pitters are pretty much rubbish as cherries do not regimentally grow to precisely the same shape and size, or have the stone positioned in geometrically perfect centre of the fruit.
My grandmother used a safety pin – and she of the jars and jars of cherry preserves each year – medium sized, insert the end and pop! comes the stone carried out neatly on the eye of the safety pin. Thingy. The looped end.
It's still worth it
Tools regardless, it’ll still be carnage, juice spray-wise. But – and finally we’re getting to the ‘but’ – it’s all worth it because cherries are just such a rewarding fruit.
They stay in shape, even pitted. They don’t release much juice or go floppy so you can use them raw in cakes with impunity. They look gorgeous: vibrant circles in the cross section of my cake? Yes please.
What are morello cherries?
An aside here on morello cherries – they are a different species. You don’t eat them raw, at least don’t enjoy the experience; they are sour and sometimes bitter. But for cooking and baking, there is no better. That was actually the variety that my Grandma used – she wouldn’t bother with sweet/dessert cherries, much too common for her taste.
Cherries are great in cakes
I use what there is, local and in season (as I’ve preached time and time again) so I’m not going to source morello cherries for my double-decker cake however fantastic they might have made the cake. Plain sweet – pitted – cherries are great too, especially that they won’t dissolve into jam after being lightly baked.
The best cake with stone fruit?
And lightly baked they are in this recipe – in fact everything is lightly or pre-baked for this cake. Make the batter, spread half at the bottom and blind bake it like it was a tart or a pie. Then the lightly baked fruit goes on – baked so it doesn’t release too much juice though I said cherries are well-behaved like that – followed by the rest of the batter. Twice baking the base won’t burn it in case you worried, it’s only done to seal it, like in blind baking. And there you have it – a double-decker cherry, with the vibrant burgundy-coloured fruit round and triumphant across the layers of the cake.