200 g Butter; (2 sticks minus 1
; 1/2 Tbl)
125 g Flour; (4 1/2 oz)
125 g Ground hazelnuts
200 g Sugar; (7 oz)
4 Eggs
3 ts Cacao
100 g Chocolate; chopped* (4 oz)
1 ts Vanilla extract
3 ts Rum
3 ts Cinnamon
1 1/2 ts Baking powder
1 cn Sour cherries**
* You will have chop the chocolate by hand. Do not reduce the
chocolate to a floury consistency. The size should be that of small
peas. You want to have small pieces of chocolate in your cake after
it baked. You can use chocolate morsels instead. But the quality of
the cake improves if you use a good quality chocolate and not the
regular chocolate morsels. Match the quality of your chocolate with
the quality of your cacao.
** I think cherries preserved in light sirup are best, but you can use
whatever you can find. Sour cherries give a much more intense flavour
than sweet cherries. You want about 300 g of cherries, but if you
have a bit more or less it does not really matter. The only thing is,
the cherries are largely responsible for the nice moisture of the
cake.
Cream butter with the sugar. Add eggs, one by one. Add the vanilla.
Mix flour, hazelnuts, baking powder and add. Add rum, cinamon and
cacao. (Hints for adding the cacao: If you use a machine, just add it
here. If you do the cake by hand, you might want to reserve a bit of
the sugar and mix it with the cacao to reduce the amount of lumps you
have. Or mix the cacao with the other dry ingredients.) Fold in the
chocolate. Carefully fold in the drained cherries.
Put dough in well buttered form. You might consider dusting the form
with whatever you use for this. I use a 26 cm (10 in) springform with
the insert that makes a hole in the middle of the cake. This makes a
nicely sized if a bit flat cake. If you want to use the flat insert,
1 1/2 times the recipe should be about right.
Bake in preheated oven at 350 F for 50 to 65 minutes. Do not
overbake, one of the nice features of this cake is its moisture. Test
with a wooden stick or a clean knife for doneness. If it comes out
clean after you put it in the center of cake, the cake is done. But
do not be deceived by the moisture of the cherries or the melted
chocolate, so try two or three different spots, cleaning the knife or
wooden stick after each use. I do not know why, but the baking time
of this cake can vary considerably from oven to oven, and it also
will depend on what form and overall quantity you use.
Possible substitutions: Use walnuts instead of hazelnuts. Decorate
cake with confectioner’s sugar, or a chocolate glaze, and/ or whole
nuts.
Yields
1 servings