12/19 Cranberry Cake

The weather this week has been pretty awful. It could have been our fault because we’ve been baking up a storm. We decided to finish off the year with a bang. In addition to our last quarterly challenge, we threw a party to celebrate the completion of our first year of baking and to celebrate the holidays.

We made fudge and pumpkin cheesecakes, hello dolly bars and spiced wine. This post though will be about the treat we were most excited about; the cranberry obsession cake.

Sara found this recipe online from Sunset magazine and was drooling and sharing it with me immediately. I must admit that I thought it could taste better if it were a raspberry cake but I agreed with Sara that cranberries were more Christmas-y.

The cake part came first and it was a perfect end to the year using our polished skills at separating egg whites. The recipe calls for 7 of them!

The cranberry filling was made next and it was truly delicious. I was really getting excited about this cake then.

The frosting was next and I’m again surprised at how good homemade frosting can taste. This is a new process that we hadn’t tried before. We used the rest of the egg whites in the carton (5 for those who weren’t paying attention) and cook them up with some sugar and a pinch of salt. This then gets beaten into a sort of meringue. 

Then a whole pound of butter and 12 oz of white chocolate get mixed in. We love this frosting.

We even made this cake again for Christmas dinner. The tartness of the cranberries is a great combination for the sweetness of the cake and frosting. It was really fantastic.

Lessons learned: In making this cake twice, we learned that some cherry preserves are better than others. We prefer… Also, we did not use the liqueur on the cake and felt it came out just fine. It wasn’t lacking anything.