Chocolate Cake with Cherry Filling

Sometimes it is the simplest things that are the most elegant. - Ina Garten


Your are free to accuse me of not being creative in coming up with a name for this recipe. It is no "decadent blah blah," or "rich and moist blah blah." I hate pretentious cakes. This is what it is - a simple chocolate cake with a cherry filling. And yes, this is another product of the leftovers and nearly-expired stuff I collected from my freezer and pantry. The Peotraco cocoa powder survived Christmas, New Year and Easter in my pantry, but did not last longer than three days after being made into this cake. (Three days is long for glucophobic people like us.) And you may have guessed also that the cherry pie filling was also plucked out of the bowels of my freezer.


I wanted a 'light' chocolate cake (as if such exists) for this project so I decided on using a Devil's food cake recipe (aka old-fashioned chocolate cupcakes). I removed that extra half-cup of sugar, of course. The cake ended up 'light' (read, not dense) and fluffy, but still moist - perhaps because of the two(!) cups of refined sugar added.

I tweaked the cherry pie filling a bit by heating it with one tablespoon each of lemon juice and brandy. You may want to add some sugar if you find the cherries too sour, but do not omit the lemon juice. Believe me, it will mask the 'canned-taste' (or 'freezer-taste,' in my case).


After cutting the cake in half, I then doused it with more brandy before pouring the filling.

I used a chocolate buttercream to ice the cake. You can search then net for a chocolate buttercream recipe, but i simply used equal amounts of creamed butter and the chocolate condensed milk icing my family typically uses for traditional chocolate cakes. (Scroll down this previous post and the recipe is somewhere there.)