rosemary forest cake (rosemary, black cherry and coffee cake)

I’ve realized that my younger cousin is one of my favourite people to bake with. She is always up for a challenge and indulges me in inedible onion greens and flavour testing (whereas my mom, when asked for advice, always tells me to “just make it vanilla!” Which I do. Sometimes.) Not only that, but she is rather agreeable, and sometimes even downright enthused, about doing the dishes–a rare and valuable trait.

We had another baking day as she was visiting. It was spent mostly with her, up to her arms in detergent bubbles, and me, covered in flour and hands stained with cherry juice. The end product was a cake, which remains to this day the butt of many a joke (they all begin roughly like “Have you made any more herb forests lately?” and the unfortunate thing is that for some reason I quite often have.)

This will sound like a very unfocused cake, and I would agree it is, as there are a number of things going on (red fife flour, rosemary, coriander, coffee, pistachio, brandy and cherry). But I think it is my favourite layer cake (out of the very few that there are) on tentimestea. While there was a lot going on, everything blended together in that way which might be known as confusing but which I prefer to deem as the appropriately pretentious (because I don’t really know what I’m saying) “complex.”

All the components have a bit of heaviness and warmth to them, and there are some repeated flavours so I think it prevents it from being a bit too disparate and unfocused. In fact, in retrospect, there was a bit of a peanut butter-and-jelly theme with the pistachio and the cherry. The result is a cake that is not too sweet (see either pavlova), or too sour (see rhubarb cake) or bitter (see upcoming linzer torte). It was a very smooth and comforting cake, pleasant in flavour and texture, and that is sometimes all you need.

(Here is The Cousin being cheeky.)

But the top did not work out how I wanted it to. I was envisioning a few very tall and proud stalks of rosemary, like skinny snow-dusted coniferous trees. Unfortunately, the stunted and light-starved rosemary plant was having none of this. I decided to compensate for the absent elegance and majesty of the original design by using a handful of short rosemary sprigs (i.e. the rosemary field-of-weeds cake).

The cake had a very nice texture–a bit fluffier, sandy almost, and drier which was appropriate given the sloppiness and moisture of the pastry cream. Splitting the dry-ingredients and the butter-ingredients into thirds and mixing each layer separately just before baking was much more successful than last time’s succession of tough and world-weary cakes. I also tried using some sourdough starter in the style of a sourdough cake I recently saw.

(We tried some artsy photos as well…with mixed results.)

Remarkably, all the flavours seemed to come out–it was fragrant with coffee and somehow you could ascribe coriander and rosemary as well.

I also really enjoyed the cherries. They were quite intense, stewed together with a bit of coffee and brandy. I think they also would have been quite nice on their own with some heavy cream!

I thought I would bring this to the linkup party Fiesta Friday, hosted by the lovely Angie, the Novice Gardener. It’s been a while (and likewise I also made this cake months ago…)–the last one I attended was back in September, over two and a half months ago. I haven’t looked around too much yet, but just scrolling through the page has revealed a lot of familiar blogs, and maybe some new ones? I’ll look forwards to meeting and visiting some of you!

rosemary forest cake

The coriander and coffee were a bit spontaneous, something I remembered from a suggestion and some advice-! As was the sourdough starter, after seeing this sourdough carrot cake!