I love that we live five minutes from a ‘Pick Your Own’ fruit farm, it means I can indulge whenever I have an urge to make something specific. Take yesterday for instance, I really fancied making a cake with fresh cherries so off seven year old M 
and I popped to go and pick a glut of cherries for the cake and a few left over to snack on. Perfect. Regular readers may notice a theme in my recipes of using a lot of vanilla extract, my chocolate cakes have to taste of vanilla too and for this cake I wanted a strong sweet vanilla taste to go with the ever so slightly sharper cherries. Nielsen-Massey sent me some of their vanilla extract to try and this is what I used in this recipe. I usually use Nielsen-Massey vanilla bean paste in my recipes, I was still pleased with the result though, a vanillary cake, not overpowering the subtle cherry taste but if 
you are not such a fan you can just take out a spoon of the vanilla extract. I also wanted to top the cake with a sour cream and white chocolate icing, however tiredness got to me, I made a mistake with the quantities and ended up with a dipping sauce instead. I think it would go beautifully with this cake though. In hindsight, you can’t go wrong with a simple glacé icing, which is probably my favourite anyway!
- 300g Fresh Cherries, pitted and halved
- 250g butter, melted and then cooled slightly
- 250g Self Raising Flour
- 250g soft brown sugar
- 3 eggs, beaten
- 2 tsp vanilla extract, I use Nielsen-Masey
- 1 tsp baking powder
- Flour to coat the cherries
- Fresh cherries to decorate
- Icing sugar to decorate
- Preheat the oven to 180ºC
- Grease and line a traybake tin 20x30cm
- Melt the butter on a very low heat and then allow to cool slightly
- Remove the stones from the cherries and halve, leave to one side
- Add the sugar, then the eggs and vanilla extract to the melted butter and mix well
- Stir into the mixture the flour and baking powder
- Toss the halved cherries in flour and then gently stir into the mixture
- Pour the cake mixture into the tin and bake for 30 minutes or until firm
- Remove from the oven and allow to cool
- Decorate with a simple glacé icing (water & icing sugar) and decorate with cherries.
- When the icing is set cut the cake into squares and serve.
Hi,
I love your blog! I’ve had a great time browsing through your recipes. Can’t wait to try the cherry and vanilla traybake!
Oh thank you that is so lovely to hear. The speed the traybake went I think my children recommend it. 🙂
This looks so good! You are really lucky to live near a pick your own farm. You can’t get much fresher than that!
Thanks Ciara, I know I love it…we are very lucky.
I can’t wait to have a fitted kitchen so I can start baking!
Is it a near event? hope so, that must be hard.