Holiday Cake By: Jack Bruckner

~ Holiday Cake ~    

Recipe

Ingredients:
8 oz cream cheese
1 C margarine or butter
1 1\2 C sugar
1 1\2 tsp vanilla
4 eggs
3\4 C drained maraschino cherries
2 TBS milk
1 1\2 tsp baking powder
2 1\4 C flour
1\2 C chopped walnuts (optional)

Directions:
Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
In a stand mixer, cream together cream cheese, butter, sugar and vanilla. Egg eggs, one at a time. Once mixed, add drained cherries and milk and mix again. Sift dry ingredients and add to creamed ingredients. Add chopped nuts if you choose to use them. Mix. Grease bread tins. Divide evenly into 2 bread loaf pans. Bake @ 325 degrees for 60 Minutes. Check if done by inserting a knife in center. If it comes out clean, it's done. Cool on cooling racks. Makes 2 loaves.

Preparation Method

For my third and last baking blog project I decided to make a Holiday cake that is a recipe from my grandma. It really isn't a cake, but a sweet bread. Kind of like a fruit cake but much better.  This recipe used the creaming method. I had to cream the cream cheese, butter and sugar. The Creaming Method causes aeration or creating tiny seed bubbles into the fat.  According to my notes from class, butter, when properly creamed, significantly lightens in color because of billions and billions of tiny air bubbles change the way light reflects from the mass. Most of the time this is done with sugar, which acts as an abrasive cutting tiny holes into the fat, which then seal over, creating tiny bubbles. The creaming method helps baked goods have a fine texture. This creaming method reminds me of how we made cookies in class. We made oatmeal raisin, gingerbread and spritz cookies. With all three, we used the creaming method. I especially liked the spritz cookies. 

Critique

The cake was pink in color due to the maraschino cherries with some slight browning on the sides and bottom. Some cracks on top. When sliced, I could see the cherries as well as some small spots of white. I guess the white spots must have been some cream cheese that didn't get mixed in all the way. I didn't add any nuts to my cake because I don't like nuts in baked things. I used Pam cooking spray to grease my pans. It was done in exactly 1 hour. When I turned them over on the cooling racks, the cakes didn't come out of the pans right away. I let them cool a bit them used a spatula to lift the side out and then they came right out. The cakes smelled like a regular cake was baking. Like something sweet. The texture of the cake was smooth with small chunks of cherries. It was also a bit dense, not light. The cake had a light cherry flavor. It was very moist probably because of all the butter and cream cheese. I would make this Holiday Cake again. It seemed more like a snack bread than a regular dessert cake, so you could eat it any time of the day, not just for dessert. I wasn't sure what maraschino cherries were so I learned what they were and that I like them.

~ Jack  Hr. 2