When summer fruit season is here, I find myself craving cherry desserts nonstop! Some of our other popular recipes using this wonderful ruby red fruit are my Homemade Cherry Pie, Cherry Vanilla Ice Cream, and Black Forest Cake! Happy birthday to this here little blog of mine! It’s hard to believe that I’ve been creating and sharing recipes on this little corner of the internet for FOUR years now! And just like in years past, I am celebrating with a special new addition to my collection of cake recipes. I absolutely love and adore cobblers, crisps, and fruit pies or all kinds. But when it comes to a special occasion, I feel this sense of obligation to bake a celebratory cake. I love baking cakes and have started branching out and experimenting with new cake flavors and combinations. Once you have some cake basics under your belt, like a yellow cake, vanilla cake, or chocolate cake, you can mix and match with frostings and fillings to make some really unique dessert creations that are sure to delight friends and family. This year though, I decided to do a mash-up of my favorite vanilla cake and a classic cherry crisp! The result was even better than I imagined it would be and I’m itching for another reason to make it again ASAP! The cherry filling is just a half-batch of the filling I make for pie. And the crisp filling is soooo good and adds the most amazing textural element to this cake. I thought about this cake for days before I made it and honestly wasn’t sure how it would turn it. But it’s easily one of my favorite cakes I’ve ever made.
How to make cherry crisp cake
The length of the recipe and ingredient list might be daunting for some bakers, but none of it is actually very difficult. It’s just a few more steps than a normal cake to make the fillings. You can even cheat on the cherry filling and just used canned cherry pie filling if you want. And the super easy crisp crumble layer takes all of 2 minutes to make and 10 minutes to bake. You can make any of the parts of the cake – the cake layers, the fillings, or the frosting – a day or more in advance. Then just assemble on the day you want to serve the cake!
Make the cake layers
Make the crisp topping/filling
Make the cherry filling
Make the buttercream frosting
Assemble
Tips for making and decorating professional looking cakes
I’m definitely not a cake professional. And I still advocate the beauty of a rustically finished cake that is frosted by hand with just a butter knife and has swirls on top instead of a perfectly smooth finish. But I’ve also discovered that I really enjoy the challenge of creating something that looks like it is professionally done. Here are my best tips and tricks for achieving those kinds of results!
Make sure your layers are level
I think most people know already that you shouldn’t try to stack cake layers that are rounded on top. But it bears repeating. One year my husband decided he was going to make a cake on a whim. Except he took the cake layers with round tips and balanced them on top of each other, trying to fill in around the edges with frosting. It was a disaster and the cake split right down the middle.
Getting level cake tops straight out of the oven: I have found that if I use room temperature ingredients, my cake layers bake more evenly and I rarely have to do much leveling, especially with this cake recipe. But pans and ovens make a difference too. Make sure to preheat your oven for a good 20 minutes before baking for the most even results.Leveling cake layers: If you do need to level your cake layers to you have a flat surface on to work with (it happens to the best of us), use a long serrated knife to cut in horizontally an inch or two all around the top of the cake, then carefully cut all the way across and lift off the scraps. Or you can purchase a cake leveler from a craft store or online.
Cake decorating tools to invest in
Having the right tools makes decorating cakes so much easier! These are the ones I highly recommend if you find you enjoy making and decorating cakes and want to take your skills to the next level.
Cake turntable. This is a flat disc that you can manually spin while holding a large, flat tool at a 45 degree angle to get smooth frosting around the edges of the cake. It also helps to get on eye-level with the cake and make sure it is level after adding each layer. Offset spatula. These tools are basically a cross between a big flat knife and a rubber spatula and they make it much easier to spread the frosting around the cake and finish the top.Bench scraper or other edge finisher. You can get these tools in metal or plastic in various sizes, but the idea is that it has a sturdy, flat edge that drags around the side of the cake as you spin it, smoothing out the frosting for clean, even edges.Cardboard rounds. These are available at any craft store in the same size as your cake pans. Place one down before you began stacking and assembling your cake. Then it’s easy to slip a cake lifter under the cake and move it to the cake stand.Cake lifter. This large, flat metal tool is basically like a giant spatula that slides under the cake and helps you move it to a decorative cake stand.
Make space in your fridge or freezer
I have had the most success frosting cakes when I take advantage of a blast of chilly air to help set the filling and frosting, especially if I’m making cake during warmer months when my house isn’t very cool. The fridge works just as well as the freezer, although you will need to wait longer for the frosting and filling to set, which is why I recommend using the freezer if you can find the space. This is one of the fussiest parts of cake decorating because it makes everything take longer when you are taking the whole cake in and out of the freezer every 10-15 minutes, but it makes it so much easier to frost without worrying about the layers sliding around or crumbs getting mixed into the outer frosting layer. Also, that final 10-15 minutes in the freezer makes it so easy to transfer the whole cake to a cake stand without worry about getting fingerprints on the cake because even that small amount of chilling helps the buttercream get sturdy enough for the transfer without damage.
More cake recipes
Strawberries and Cream Sheet CakeBest Carrot CakeChocolate Texas Sheet CakeGerman Chocolate CakeCherry Chip CakeBest Red Velvet CakeHomemade Funfetti CakeYellow Cake with Chocolate FrostingNo-Bake Chocolate Eclair CakePeach CakePina Colada Cake
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