It's Kind of Crummy, All Right: Sour Cherry Crumb Cake

I haven't had time to make it to the fruit orchard yet this year, but I have the good fortune to have a colleague who not only spent Father's Day picking an enormous quantity of sour cherries at Larriland Farm, but also was willing to share some of his fruit bounty with me (thanks, Michael!).

I flipped through the index of quite a few cookbooks looking for sour cherry recipes. The first one I found was a suggested cherry variation of a blueberry crumb cake recipe from Nick Malgieri's Perfect Cakes. Malgieri says this cake is one of his favorites and he makes it at least half a dozen times each summer, so it looked promising. The cake batter is made from flour, baking powder, salt, softened butter, sugar, eggs, egg yolks, and vanilla. After you make the batter and spread it out in a pan, you sprinkle on the fruit (in this case, three cups of sour cherries) and then a crumb topping made of flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and melted butter.

The recipe yields a small amount of batter, so you can see that the cake isn't very tall. The cherries stayed intact and didn't sink very much; I thought the sliced cake was just beautiful. If only this cake tasted as good as it looked! The cake itself was slightly dry and quite bland, and the crumb topping had too much nutmeg. In short, this cake was pretty crummy and I won't bother ever trying the recipe again. Thankfully, I still have an ample sour cherry supply remaining and I will try to make the most of it!

Recipe: "Blueberry Crumb Cake (Cherry Crumb Cake Variation)," from Perfect Cakes by Nick Malgieri.