Yesterday I just got back from my short vacation to Eastern Oregon for five days. I had an amazing time there, the scenery is so beautiful, it's worth driving the long miles. Even though I'm tempted to write the story here, I usually write it down on my personal
blog. I also am taking a two-week vacation from my summer work since last week, and today I realize how good it feels not to wake up in the morning to my alarm buzz.
Last night while I was just done with dinner and starting to read last week's newspapers, my phone rang. It was my friend, Julie, who wanted to come over and she's saying that she had something to share with me. In less than five minutes she was at my door, bringing me a tasty treat. It was Rainier cherries; big in size and sweet in flavor. We exchanged our hellos and started to talk about where to buy cherries with the best prize. So far, she won :) I went to pick cherries a couple weeks ago at Hood River and they're quite expensive though they're organics. My parents and my family picked several types of cherries, including Bing, Lambert, Van, and Rainier. We went a bit overboard with the deed, it seemed that once you picked you couldn't stop until all the buckets were full. I don't know if that's called greedy or it's just plain uncontrollable yearning after waiting for a year for the cherry season to arrive.
Most of the cherries have been eaten fresh, some will be made into cherry pie filling, and a handful made it as the filling for a simple, four-layer cake. I made up my mind of what kind of cake I wanted to make, this time a vanilla chiffon cake was suffice to be the base. Whipped cream was the frosting and fresh Rainier cherries soaked in kirsch dressed up the cake. The result was a rustic and homey cake. The flavor is fantastic though, if you're a fan of chiffon cake, you'll like it when it's paired with whipped cream and fresh fruits--I'm always partial to this combo anyway.
There's no definite recipe to get this cake right. All you need is some creativity:
- Have about 2-3 cups of fresh, pitted cherries, let them soak in a tablespoon or two of kirsch in a bowl before you start the cake.
- Recipe for vanilla chiffon cake can be found here. It's from my old blog and to change it into a vanilla-flavored cake, change the lime juice with water, omit lemon extract, add vanilla extract instead, and add lemon zest.
- In this post, I made the cake in two 9-inch pans and each cake was cut into two layers. Alternately, you could still bake it in three 8-inch pans like the original recipe. Baking time for 9-inch pans is about 20 minutes.
- I made whipped cream frosting from 2 cups of heavy cream and 2 tablespoon of sugar.
It didn't need to look perfect as along as it tasted delicious! My son could eat this night after night for dessert.
