Cherries ≅ Almonds?

It's Lindsey's birthday tomorrow, so I'm baking her a cake. One of my recent purchases was a Bundt/Kugelhopf cake tin, which I'd quite like to try out. So having looked through my baking books, there was a standout recipe - the Chocolate Amaretto Bundt Cake from the Magnolia Bakery book that my friend Teia sent me for my birthday. The only snag was, I don't have any Amaretto. But looking at my drinks collection, I do have a bottle of cherry brandy that I think will substitute nicely, so hopefully it'll work well!

Chocolate and Cherry Brandy Bundt Cake

Ingredients

• 230g Butter
• 240g Caster sugar*
• 150g Soft brown sugar*
• 4 Eggs
• 170g Dark chocolate
• 235ml Milk
• 3tsp Almond extract
• 1tsp Vanilla extract
• 220g Plain flour
• 1tsp Bicarbonate of soda
• 4tbsp Cherry brandy

Method

1. Cream the butter and sugars together until fluffy.
2. Beat in the eggs, one at a time.
3. Melt the chocolate and mix in.
4. Stir in the milk, almond extract and vanilla extract.
5. Gradually sift in the flour and baking powder, beating the mixture smooth after each addition.
6. Stir in the cherry brandy.
7. Pour into a greased and floured Bundt cake tin and bake at 180C/Gas Mark 4 for ~45-50 minutes. Test with a skewer.
8. Allow to cool in the tin for ~20 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack.

*The recipe actually calls for 190g caster sugar and 200g soft brown sugar, but I ran out of soft brown sugar. I don't think it'll make a massive difference, though it might be a little less flavoursome!

This cake batter is amazing! At the end of step 3, before the almond and vanilla extracts went in, it smelt like Ovaltine. Absolutely wonderful. But having never baked a cake like this before, I have no idea how much it'll rise... I've got a nasty feeling that this might overflow! Yup! It overflowed. Not horrendously though. I'm just really hoping it's cooked all the way through now. And that it'll come out of the tin...But no! Disaster! The cake was absolutely stuck fast. In desperation, I tried taking a turboflame lighter to the outside of the tin trying to heat it up in the hope that the expansion might help free the cake. And when that failed, I googled for ideas, trying one that suggested doing similar but using a tea towel in the kitchen sink soaked in boiling water to heat the tin up. On the plus side, I did find out that the cake is indeed cooked through. It's also rather moist and tastes excellent too, so a big thumbs up for the recipe. It's just a shame it didn't come out of the tin. And it would have been so pretty too. Oh well, I'll let the cake cool in the tin and then we can just hack it apart when we serve it tomorrow!You saw that coming though, right? I was definitely half-expecting it...