Cake "Drunken Cherry"

Cake "Drunken Cherry" is an adored classic. There are a lot of options for preparing this dessert, but there is no unambiguously correct recipe. Each housewife prepares this cake according to her taste and preferences. I offer you my repeatedly proven recipe for chocolate cake with cherries.

Ingredients

• For the biscuit:
• Flour - 2.5 cups (250 ml)
• Cocoa powder - 6 tbsp. spoons
• Sugar - 1-1.5 cups (250 ml)
• Vanilla sugar - 1 sachet
• Salt - 1/2 teaspoon
• Boiling water - 1 cup (200 ml) + 1 tbsp. a spoonful of vinegar
• Odorless vegetable oil - 100 g
• Milk - 1 cup (250 ml)
• Eggs - 2 pcs.
• Soda - 1 teaspoon
• Baking powder - 1 sachet (15-18 g)
• For cream:
• Butter - 250 g
• Condensed milk - 1 can (380 g)
• For filling:
• Cherry in own juice (pitted) - 0.5 l jar
• or fresh or frozen cherries - 300-400 g
• Cognac - 75-100 ml
• For glaze:
• Sugar - 4 tbsp. spoons
• Starch - 5 g (1 teaspoon)
• Butter - 40-50 g
• Milk - 150-200 ml
• Cocoa - 4 tbsp. spoons
• For decoration:
• milk chocolate

Directions

1. First you need to "drunk" the cherry. This must be done at least 5-12 hours before making the cake. If, like me, you use ready-made canned cherries, then you need to drain the liquid into a separate bowl (we will soak the biscuit with it), and pour cognac over the cherry itself. If you take fresh or frozen (defrost) cherries, then you need to remove the seeds, pour them with cognac and sprinkle with an additional 3-4 tbsp. tablespoons of sugar, depending on how sour the cherry is.
2. Sift all the dry ingredients into a bowl: flour, cocoa, sugar, vanilla sugar, a teaspoon of soda, a bag of baking powder, a pinch of salt. Do not be afraid that there is so much baking powder here, plus soda - you will not feel the smell of soda either during baking or in the finished biscuit. By the way, salt also helps to neutralize the smell of soda in the dough.
3. In a separate bowl, mix eggs, milk and vegetable oil. We just mix.
4. We combine both mixtures. The wet mixture should simply moisten the dry ingredients.
5. You should have a very thick dough that you can roll into balls.
6. We take a glass (200 ml) of boiling water, pour it into the dough and quickly mix with a mixer until smooth. I advise you to add a tablespoon of vinegar to the water, this helps to completely get rid of the smell of soda.
7. At this point, the oven should already be preheated to 200 degrees and the mold should also be prepared (my mold diameter is 23 cm). I lined the bottom with parchment paper and didn't grease the sides.
8. Pour the dough into the mold, scroll it a little so that the dough is evenly distributed.
9. A little about the baking itself. This dough likes to bake for the first 20-30 minutes at a high temperature of 200-210 degrees, and then reach a low temperature of 150-160 degrees for about 30 minutes too. Focus on your oven, but remember that the first half of baking is high temperature, the second half is below average. You can cover the form with foil greased with oil - according to my observations, the dough rises higher and more evenly, but there will be a tubercle anyway, because there are baking powder in the dough.
10. Let the biscuit cool well. To lie down, of course, is desirable for him, but not critical.
11. Cooking cream. Everything is very simple: gradually add condensed milk to the softened butter and mix with a mixer.
12. (When half the amount of condensed milk is added, take 2-3 tablespoons of cream to decorate the cake.)
13. We cut off a tubercle from the biscuit, then cut off the “lid” about 1 cm thick. From the remaining biscuit, select the pulp, leaving the walls and bottom 1 cm thick. You should get an impromptu bowl. We soak the biscuit "bowl" with the previously drained cherry syrup.
14. We also impregnate the "lid".
15. (If you used frozen or fresh cherries, then before adding the cherries to the cream, the liquid formed in it must be drained. Add 100-150 ml of water, a couple of tablespoons of sugar to this cherry juice, boil, cool and you can soak the biscuit "bowl" with this syrup and lid.")
16. We cut the pulp and the cut tubercle into small pieces (do not forget to set aside 150 g of pulp for sprinkling the sides and decorating the cake).
17. We combine the pulp, cream and cherries together with cognac. Mix everything well so that all the pieces and crumbs of the biscuit are covered with cream.
18. We return back to the biscuit "bowl", align and cover with a "lid". We put the cake in the refrigerator for an hour so that the cream and biscuit cool a little.
19. In a saucepan, combine sugar, cocoa, starch, butter and milk.
20. We put on a small fire, stirring constantly, bring to a boil. From the beginning, the mass will be lumpy, but then it will become homogeneous and glossy. (I want to say that cocoa, and starch, and spoons are also different, so adjust the thickness of the glaze with milk. Make sure that the glaze is not very liquid, but not too thick. It should be the consistency of condensed milk.)
21. From the pulp of the biscuit set aside earlier, with the help of a blender we make crumbs or simply grind the biscuit with our hands.
22. Drizzle hot icing over cooled cake. Let the icing on the cake cool a little and grab - and you can decorate. Sprinkle the sides of the cake with biscuit crumbs. Decorate the top to your liking. I garnished with the remaining buttercream using a pastry bag and topped with cherries.
23. I melted milk chocolate (30 g) right in the bag in the microwave, squeezed it onto parchment paper in the form of decorative figures.
24. I separated the cooled figures with a knife and decorated the cake with them. We give the cake "Drunken Cherry" 1-1.5 hours to brew and you can eat.
25. Cook with pleasure and enjoy.