Cranberry Cake with Butter Sauce

Alyssa Bartling

Hour 1

Cranberry Cake with Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Cranberry Cake

1 1/2 T. butter

1/2 c. sugar

1 t. salt

1/4 c. water

1/4 c. evaporated milk

1 c. flour

1 t. baking soda

1 heaping cup ground cranberries

Butter Sauce

1/2-1 c. evaporated milk

1/2 c. butter

1 c. sugar

1 t. vanilla

Directions

Cranberry Cake

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F and grease an 8x8 pan (or can be made as muffins).
2. In a food processor, chop cranberries until finely ground. 
3. Cream together butter and sugar.
4. Mix water, salt, evaporated milk, flour, baking soda, and ground cranberries into the creamed butter and sugar.
5. Bake cake for 20 minutes.
6. Let cool.

Butter Sauce 

1. Add evaporated milk, butter, sugar and vanilla into a saucepan.
2. Heat to a boil.

Preparation Method

For this recipe, I stuck fairly close to the original and only tweaked small things. The only changes that were made were baking the cake longer and adding more vanilla to the sauce. When I first checked the cake after 20 minutes, the middle was still undercooked. So decided to leave the cake in for 10 more minutes. My reasoning for adding more vanilla to the sauce was that the flavor wasn't very prominent with only 1 teaspoon. In this recipe, I had to use the creaming method, which is what we are currently using in class. The creaming method ensured that my final product was not going to have any larger pieces of sugar or butter throughout the cake. The creaming method also makes the cake light and fluffy. The reason creaming makes the cake fluffy is that the abrasive sugar is cutting tiny holes into the fat, creating bubbles and move volume of fat.

Critique

In my opinion, the cake was average, it wasn't amazing, but it wasn't terrible. The final appearance was so-so. The cake hadn't risen as much as I wanted it to so it looked dense and flat. The taste was delightful. It was sweet with the butter sauce, but the cranberries also gave tart/sour note to the cake. I've had this cake before and the flavor wasn't as strong as it normally is, which might be because are cranberries were a little old.  The texture, was horrid. Even with the extra 10 minutes in the oven, the center was still a little underdone and raw. Even after eating a few bites from the middle, I had a stomach ache. The edges, on the other hand, were cooked just right. Overall, the cake was very dense, which isn't very appealing. The aroma of the cake was wonderful. When the cranberries were baking in the cake, it made the whole house smell like Christmas. The butter sauce was just a great, it had a very sweet and vanilla scent.

Assessment

Honestly, I would not make this cake again. The texture was off, the taste of the cake was lackluster and just the overall dessert was uninspiring. The butter sauce was great, but didn't seem to pair well with the cranberry cake. The cake itself just has an odd flavor, it's very tart in comparison to other sweeter cakes. But this recipe taught me many things. It taught me that when you cream butter and sugar, it can look more like wet sand than what we usually see in cookies. This has to do with cakes and cookies having a vastly different ratios of butter to sugar. The recipe also taught me that even if your product looks done, it isn't always totally cooked. Normally, it is thought that, especially with cookies, that even when it is out of the oven it can still cook until done. That as obviously not the case here, as even with extra time and carry-over baking, the cake still was undercooked in the middle.