Please note - this is full of sugary deliciousness and not waistline friendly at all LOL but soooo worth it! 

While staying in Melbourne with family earlier this month, my fiance and I had a chance to cook dinner for the whole family. Normally this would be a piece of cake (ha! pun intended!) but I decided to venture outside of my normal savory-food-main-course-comfort-zone (leaving the lasagna in Matt's capable hands) and bake some sort of dessert.

Racking my brain I couldn't come up with something myself BUT I did remember enjoying a delicious Serbian cherry cake at a work morning tea, which was baked by my talented work-bestie Kat. So I texted her asking for both the recipe and some much needed help.

Kat's recipe text

Of course she said yes (cos shes's freaking awesome!) and promptly translated and sent the recipe through and told me I shouldn't stress, as it was easy as! She also kindly let me share it here with you guys too.

Bakin Kolach (pronounced Baa-kin ko-lack) 

aka Serbian Cherry Cake recipe

- Ingredients - 

1.5 cups of brown sugar

2 cups of plain flower 

1 tsp of baking powder 

1 cup of sunflower oil

1 cup of Greek yogurt 

1 tsp of vanilla sugar (or 1 scrapped vanilla pod) 

5 eggs 

1 jar of pitted Marco Polo Cherries (drained)

Dry paper towels 

- Kat's Method - 

Step 1) Put everything in a large bowl, except the cherries 

and blend until smooth with electric beaters

Step 2) Pour into baking receptacle - cake tin, loaf, square tray etc

Step 3) Place in a pre-heated fan-forced oven at 180 degrees C 

for approx 1 min, then take out and sprinkle cherries on top

Step 4) Bake for approx 30-40 mins or until golden brown 

and you can stab it with skewer that comes out clean 

Step 5) Once cooked pull it of the oven and cover with dry paper towel 

while it cools (keeps it moist). Once cooled, slice it up and store in an airtight container

So off to good old Woolies I went, ingredient list in hand only to have my phone die half way through >.<. and ready to Masterchef my way through this bad boy. In the end the only substitution I had to make was the vanilla sugar for actual real vanilla pods. Side note, they make it look so damn easy on those cooking shows to just cut it open and scrape out the tiny lil beans. I call bullshit sir! There was definitely more effort required and about 10 minutes worth of poking and scraping to get all the vanillery goodness out.

Ingredients: eggs, plain flour, greek yogurt, baking powder, pitted cherries, vanilla, brown sugar, sunflower oil and paper towels

First I mixed all the dry ingredients together and then added all the wet. 

dry ingredients: flour, sugar, vanilla, baking powder in mixing bowl

make a well then add wet ingredients: eggs, yogurt, oil

  

Then I poured the fairly wet batter into a cake tin (that I thought would work) and popped in the 180 C oven for one minute. DON'T then realise the original cake tin you chose is leaking, pull out said lava hot cake tin, nearly burn yourself while pouring the majority of the batter in to a smaller non-leaking cake tin while getting the rest all over the bench, the stove and the floor LOL.

cake tin: option 2 (less leaky - add foil to bottom ala Mcguyver stylez)

After a minute, pull out the cake and sprinkle the whole jar's worth of drained cherries onto the top of the cake. Ever so slightly smoosh them down into the cake so they're mostly submerged but not so much that they sink to the bottom. Put back in the oven.

smoosh in the cherries - I should have submerged these more than they are here

pop into the oven to bake!

Bake for approx 30-40 minutes or until golden brown and a skewer can be stabbed into the middle and pulled out cleanly. 

note: depending on the depth of your tin, you may need less or more time. Also if you find it going too golden brown too quick and is still raw in the middle, lower the temp to 160 and bake for a bit longer. 

Once the baking has finished, marvel at your baking epicness while gloating to your other half that you are now a baking goddess and that Martha Stewart ain't got nothing on you place the cake on a cooling tray/the bench and drape/wrap dry paper towels over the top - this will help trap the steam and subsequent moisture in the cake while it cools. Once cool, cut into pieces and store in an air tight container to stop it from drying out.

admire your handy work and proceed to nom!

 It tastes delicious on it's own, however goes very well with cream or any of the usual dessert side suspects.

Needless to say, while the creation phase was chaotic, insane and included a million text messages back to Kat crying for help, in the end it turned out quite nicely and was demolished by the entire family :D

Still rather chuffed - Bambi xox