Tuesdays with Dorie: Berry Surprise Cake

This week's TWD gave a challenge for many of us. Mary Ann of Meet Me in the Kitchen chose Dorie's Berry Surprise Cake. Many of us had flat sunken cakes, myself included. See the bottom layer, that is cake #1. It's not even 2" tall. Knowing that would not be enough for even for a trifle instead of a cut out cake, I decided to make another one. After all I had all that yummy filling! My second cake came out much better, it rose and did not sink as much. The only thing I did different from cake #1 was, I whisked the mixture for a few minutes longer. I then decided to layer to the cakes, still hollowing them out and filling them (one thing that did happen to #1, was it was SO dense in the middle, good thing it was hollowed out). For the syrup, instead of liqour, I used seedless blackberry preserves, worked great! I cut the center well out smaller, I couldn't bare to eat this cake, with not much cake at all, I wanted cake with the filling! I really stuffed the cake full of blackberry cream cheese filling, so full the cutout ended up being a mound on top. No worries, a double batch of topping evened it all out. I made a blackberry coulis (sauce) as Dorie suggested would go well with this, and it did! All in all, this was a yummy cake, but a lot of work or components rather, to get it together. I'd have been fine with just a simple vanilla cake layered with the filling and whipped cream. This cake also reminded me of this recipe I made.

I wanted so much to use raspberries instead, I even went searching for our local farmer's market, but they are not in season for them yet and the grocery stores wanted $4+ for a tiny thing! I found blackberries on sale, so I used them instead. I also had some great prep photos to go with this, but my computer ate them, if somehow I am able to recover everything that was lost, I'll post them.





Blackberry Coulis