Sweet Cherry and Corn Cake
Ingredients
for the cake:
- 1 1/4 cup flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- ¾ teaspoon salt
- 1/3 cup cornmeal
- 2 large eggs
- ⅔ cup milk
- ½ cup canola oil
- 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
- 1 cup sugar
- 2 cups pitted and halved sweet cherries
- one cob of corn's worth of kernels about 2/3 cup
for the crumb topping:
- one cob of corn's worth of kernels about 2/3 cup
- 1/2 cup flour
- 3 tablespoons sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- pinch salt
- 4 tablespoons butter melted and cooled
Instructions
For the cake:
- Preheat oven to 350. Grease and flour a 9-inch spring form pan.
- In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt and cornmeal.
- In a second bowl, beat together the eggs, milk, oil, vanilla and sugar until smooth and frothy.
- Beat the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients until a smooth batter forms. Fold in the corn and cherries.
For the crumb topping:
- Place all the ingredients for the topping in a small bowl and mix with a fork until coarse crumbs formed.
- Pour the batter in the prepared pan. Sprinkle with the crumbs in an even layer.
- Bake for 55 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean or with a few dry crumbs.
- Cool in pan for five minutes then release and cool completely.
Last summer I was thinking about making a cake with a sweet corn crumble and I kept putting it off and putting off and then next thing you know, corn was out of season. I was worried it would skew too savory then I realized what I needed to do to avoid that was to add some fruit.
I had a bunch of the sweetest cherries in the fridge so I thought why not give that a try? I don’t bake with cherries as much as I should, I always like cherry desserts but cherries are so perishable that I end up eating them out of hand before they spoil. But it’s cherry season and corn season in much of the country right now and I have an abundance of both so I got going.
This is a pretty quick cake to get together. I’ve been on a crumb cake kick lately between some recipes from my Cooking in Community project that I’ve been testing and a great apple cake I made and will post in the cooler weather. A great thing about crumb toppings is that you can make them with melted butter so you don’t have to wait for your butter to get soft. Same as using oil in the cake, it keeps it light but also speeds up the process so much. Especially in the summer when I am leary of letting my butter sit out for too long in my un-air-conditioned house. Wait too long and it’s too soft and you have to start over. For this cake, the longest part was pitting the cherries (I like my OXO pitter a lot for pitting large quantities of cherries because it is easier on my hands but the one I got at Aldi last year was cheaper and works just as well) and cutting the corn off the cob. The batter comes together super quick as does the topping.
It does take a long time to bake but we all have to make sacrifices.
I think corn desserts are really hitting the American mainstream this year. I saw a few last year and the year before (when I was not having good luck with finding sweet corn at all) and have noticed an uptick in sweet corn-flavored things like chips and popcorn but this year even Milk Bar has a summer corn cake for the summer. If you want to ease yourself into corn treats this is a great cake to try. The corn adds some sweetness, a subtle corn flavor, and texture interest (pops of corn!) but it has the cherries for extra sweetness and familiarity.
