Mahanandi

Chocolate Cherry Cake for July 4th

Warm and juicy cherries from farmers market. Unsweetened Chocovic baking chocolate from Trader Joe’s. Hazelnuts from last winter. Combined with all-purpose flour and baked together. This cherry chocolate cake has strong bitter taste. Almost like medicine, and I love that kind of choco-potency. A rare extravagance that puts in a mood for an equally decadent holiday weekend.

A chocolate cake shouldn’t be cloyingly sweet. That is the manthram I applied when I put together the following ingredients. It’s an easy recipe and the results are very bakery like.

Chocolate Cherry Cake:

8 oz unsweetened baking chocolate (Chocovic)
2 cups - fresh, sweet cherries
1 cup - all purpose flour
½ cup - sugar
¼ teaspoon each - baking soda & baking powder
¼ to ½ cup - melted ghee
¼ teaspoon - finely crushed cardamom
¼ cup - hazelnuts, finely chopped
9-inch loaf pan

Chocolate: I broke the chocolate bar to small pieces and placed them in a bowl in a microwave oven. Heated the chocolate until it melted to smooth lava like. It took about two minutes of microwave heat and two stirrings for lump-free consistency. (The chocolate can also be melted by double boiler method on stovetop setting.)

Cherries and Hazelnuts: While chocolate is cooling, I removed the pits from cherries using fingers. Cherries were very ripe, so it was quick with fingers, and I didn’t have to use knife or special gizmos like cherry pitter.

Baking Time: Kept the oven at 350 F to preheat. Lined the loaf pan with parchment paper. While oven was getting hot, flour got sifted into a vessel. To the flour, I added sugar, baking soda and baking powder. After stirring with a spoon, I added ghee, melted chocolate, and cardamom powder and combined them well together with a sturdy spoon. Pitted cherries and hazel nuts went in next. Mixing one more time, and then poured the whole thing into baking pan. The batter was fairly dense (see the images below), but manageable.

Placed the pan in preheated oven and baked the cake at 350 F for about 45 minutes. When a fork inserted in the middle of the cake came out clean, I turned off the oven and removed the pan to cool the cake. After the photography session, I finally took a break and had a small piece. Loved the bittersweet experience.