Bah

[questioncurl]

 I made an elaborate cake last night.  First a cherry sauce, in which I cooked down fresh cherries with rum and honey and black peppercorns, then mixed it with melted dark chocolate and butter, then broke eggs into it, and finally combined it with the usual flour-sugar-baking powder mixture to make a batter. I've been having problems with the oven heating up too much and burning everything, so I was very careful this time, fussing with foil and reducing the temperature every ten minutes etc. The result was a beautifully risen, perfectly baked dark chocolate cherry cake. BUT. IT'S SOUR. Sour as an orange. Sour, like your mouth puckers after biting into it. I have a sour chocolate cake and no idea what to do to salvage it.

Maybe I'll drown it in the custard I made last week.     

Comments

[lamentables]

The only suggestion I've come up with is to stab the cake lots of times with a skewer or similar and then pour something sweet and syrupy over it and leave it to soak in.

I'm curious, though, as to how it turned out sour - there doesn't seem to be anything sour in the ingredients.

[questioncurl]

The cherries were reasonably sour and got more so when cooked down. I tasted the sauce and added 1/2 cup of sugar, not too much because the chocolate and cocoa powder were also sweetened, but it didn't help.

I think, as weird as it sounds, that there is a problem with the icing sugar I have. I don't use it much, but I put it in the panna and in this, because in both cases I wanted it to dissolve quickly, as opposed to the big sugar crystals we get here, and in both cases, it hasn't sweetened enough...

I added a little bit of rum to the custard and poured it over slices of the cake. It seems to have worked!