Like berries, cherries go well with a lot of different cake recipes, but not all cakes might be equally accepting of the cherries. To understand which cakes go well with cherries, we have to look into different cake types and see if any of their recipes accommodate cherries.
Let’s start with some of the most common cake types and move to the relatively rare and exotic ones.
Butter Cake: Butter cake or yellow butter cake or simply yellow cake is one of the most common types of cakes there are. And there are many butter cake recipes that include cherry as an ingredient. Some put the berries in the combine/batter, while others use them both as an active ingredient and as part of the topping. In either case, you will get to combine the sponginess of butter cake with the bold flavor of cherries.
Three butter cake recipes that employ cherries are:
Pound Cake: Pound cake gets its name from the simplicity of its recipe, i.e., a cake made with a pound of each of the four main ingredients of the cake: flour, butter, egg, sugar. And even though they overlap a lot of butter cakes, the pound cakes tend to turn out quite different. But like butter cakes, you can also add cherries to the pound cake to give it a powerful flavor punch. In most pound cakes, cherries are part of the ingredients that go into making the cake, not on it.
Three different pound cakes that utilize cherries are:
Sponge Cake: As the name might suggest, sponge cakes tend to be a bit lighter than other cakes, especially those ladened with fat-rich butter. Cherries and sponge cake don’t make as good a (or as many) combinations as cherries make with a pound or butter cakes, but there are still sponge cakes that incorporate these tasty sour-sweet treats both in the cake mix as well as external toppings.
A couple of sponge cake recipes with cherries are:
Genoise Cake: It’s a special sub-type of sponge cake originating from Italy. The name comes from the Italian city of Genoa and what makes this cake different from most other sponge cakes is that no chemical agent is used to make the mix rise. The sponge cake’s characteristic light consistency is attained via suspending air in the body of the cake. Like other sponge cakes, Genoise accepts cherries as an ingredient, though not as openly as other, denser cakes do. The upside is that the Genoise cakes that use cherries are richer, more flavorful compared to simpler cakes that rely upon cherry for most flavor variation.
Two Genoise cake examples with cherries are:
Red Velvet Cake: Red Velvet is another common cake type. Technically, it’s a layered chocolate cake, and the layer is usually red/crimson in color or a similar shade. Originally, the red color used to come from special cocoa used to make the cake, but nowadays, food coloring is typically used. Cherries make the natural aesthetic combination of these cakes, but it also works on the taste level as well. And in most cherry-based red velvet cakes, cherries are a prominent part of the toppings.
Red velvet cakes with cherries that you might consider trying are:
Carrot Cake: This is perhaps the easiest to understand cake. Any cake that has carrots mixed into the batter would be considered a carrot cake. Since the presence of an active plant-based ingredient limits the flavor variations a bit, you might not find many examples of carrot cakes that have cherries in them. The most common example we found was cherries used as toppings in a carrot cake.
The example is:
Biscuit Cake: Biscuit cakes are another type of sponge cake. It’s usually drier compared to Genoise but tends to hold its shape better than that or other sponge cakes while still being lighter. Some biscuit cakes use biscuits in the actual cake recipe. These cakes tend to be a bit rougher and thicker, but they also offer greater variety. Some biscuit cakes are more akin to biscuits than cakes, yet they are still able to accommodate cherries into the mix.
The examples of biscuit cakes that use cherries are:
Flourless Cake: Flourless cakes are another type of cake that works quite well with cherries. Since they don’t use flour, these cakes are made with chocolate custard, aerated, but it’s still quite thick compared to light cakes. Cherries serve well as toppings for these flourless chocolate cakes and are usually accompanied by other fruits
Two example recipes of flourless cakes with cherries are:
A lot of cakes go well with cherries; you just have to find the right recipes.
Read more here: 18 Cherry Options | Queen Anne Cherries | Skeena Cherries | Dried Cherry Alternatives | Sweet Cherry Substitutes