Berry Surprise Cake -- Tuesdays with Dorie

This week for Tuesdays with Dorie, Mary Ann of Meet Me in the Kitchen chose Berry Surprise Cake. What a fun pick, thank you Mary Ann! This cake was a little complicated and even though I think I got it right it was a little dense (but not dry, yay!) and I was wishing I had poked the inside where you brush the syrup before and let it saturate a little bit. Oh-well. Let's see, this is how my egg sugar mixture looked...ribbons? Eh, not so much, but maybe, if you squint...

I don't know though, some people may have different ideas about ribbons...it was kind of hard for me to judge...I set the timer for 5 minutes of beating (that sounds lovely, doesn't it?), then went an extra minute after just to make sure.

While I'm sure I have an 8 inch springform somewhere, after reading through this recipe I knew the pan I wanted to go searching for through my kitchen was my Betty Crocker Bake 'n Fill Pan -- that I bought a few years ago thanks to an infomercial (hangs head in shame) -- I've used it maybe 3 or 4 times since then and I do like it, no regrets on the infomercial purchase this time, I just don't have a reason to use it that often. Berry Surprise Cake seemed like the perfect excuse for me to go dig out it out.

There are actually 4 pans in the Bake 'n Fill set, I decided to go with the smaller dome and was going to use the base pan but there was not enough batter. Usually there is a thin regular 8 inch cake base that is baked along with the dome cake and you put that over the filling part, just like in Dorie's recipe, minus the cutting, etc. It seemed like this pan set was made for this recipe!

I was really nervous about the cooking time, I figured since I was using the same volume of batter I could use the books 32ish minute guideline, but then I referred to the Bake 'n Fill pan recipe book, to see how long those cakes bake for, and they said 50-60 minutes, yikes! Quite a time difference. Well, at about 32 minutes (I had my timer set for 35) I decided it was time to pull the cake out of the oven, it just smelled like it was getting over done, even though I could not see the actual cake thanks to the locking inner pan. At that point I was really nervous and ready to throw in the towel if I had a burned or way underdone cake -- I planned to admit it was my fault for not using the pan specified in the recipe and just post my mistake cake. I waited 20 minutes to remove the inner pan just like I was supposed to, it was such a long 20 minutes! I gently turned the inner pan, waiting for underdone batter, burned cake, or cake stuck, and got neither, I was pleasantly surprised with how the cake looked. Golden brown, fully baked, not stuck to the pan, okay team, we're in business now :)

At that point I set up my little cake station on the dining room table. I had my syrup, my filling, my fresh raspberries, and was ready to go. I had so much fun putting this cake together. The pictures do not do this cake justice, really, they are pathetic, but that cake was beautiful, promise. But how did it taste? Wonderful! My kids especially enjoyed this cake and all the raspberries -- which were the sweetest off-season berries I've ever had, really delicious! My only regret with this cake, I wish I would have soaked in some more syrup into the cake before adding the filling, since the cake was kind of dense, very sponge cake like. Next week with TWD we get to try chocolate gingerbread, I don't know about you, but that recipe has intrigued me since my first flip through of Baking From My Home To Yours, I can't wait to give it a try. Thanks for visiting, I hope everyone had as much fun this week as I did with Berry Surprise Cake!

Oops -- I forgot to mention that I did make a couple of changes to the filling, I used only 4 ounces of cream cheese, and only 1/2 cup of cream, and doubled the sugar. After tasting the filling at that point I decided it was perfect and there was no need to add the extra 2/3 cup of cream.