Recipe : Cherry Pie Cake

I saw this recipe shared on Facebook by the lovely Rae V, and thought it looked so easy and yummy that I had to give it a try.  It really is incredibly easy, but I thought the original published recipe looked a bit "flour heavy", so I went off-piste a bit and dropped the flour by a third.  I've made the recipe twice, and I think I'm right, but if you want to go with the original published recipe, add an extra cup of flour (and let me know how that goes!).

This is an American recipe, and one thing I find a bit confusing about some recipes is that they give a measurement of "packet" or "can", and those sorts of things vary wildly from country to country.  This recipe called for two cans of cherry pie filling, which I couldn't find in our little supermarket, so I bought one jar of whole pitted cherries instead.  Once the liquid was drained off the cherries, they weighed about 370g, so that's how much I used.

My jar of pitted cherries - yep, that's supermarket brand!

And,  of course, our dodgy old oven needed baby sitting and it took nearly an hour to cook instead of the recommended 35 minutes.  I covered the cake with tin foil about 40 minutes in, and turned the oven down a bit, so the top didn't burn.

Okey dokey, let's cook, as usual my comments are in italics.

Cherry Pie Bars

• 1 cup of softened butter
• 2 cups of sugar (Yes, Mum, I can actually hear you saying "Two cups of sugar!!!!!!" in horror)
• 4 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (I forgot this, are you surprised?)
• Half teaspoon of salt
• Quarter teaspoon of almond extract (I used about half instead of a quarter)
• 2 cups of all purpose flour (the recipe says 3 cups, hmmmmm, I'm not convinced)
• 2 cans of cherry pie filling (or whatever quantity you can find, above)

1. Preheat oven to 350f
2. Cream butter and sugar, add eggs and extract, beating well to mix
3. Add flour and salt, mixing well (I added the flour a half cup at a time)
4. Spread half of the batter in a greased 9x13 pan
5. Spoon pie filling over the batter
6. Randomly drop tablespoons of remaining batter over the pie filling
7. Bake for 35 minutes or until a sharp knife comes out clean

There's an optional glaze listed, but I think the cake is sweet enough.  However, if you want to up your sugar levels into the red zone, go wild by mixing one cup of powdered sugar, 1 teaspoon of almond extract, 2 teaspoons of milk and then drizzle it over the top when the cake is cool.