Chocolate Cherry Swirl Cake

So, I did a first today. I entered a local cooking contest. The contest is held in conjunction with the town fair going on this weekend. The festival is called "The Cherry Festival" and the cooking contest was themed around that, so the recipe had to contain at least one 1/2 cup of cherries. I, by no means, consider myself a cooking or baking expert. I do like to try new recipes and often find myself finding several of a similar recipe, combining the ingredients and cooking instructions together and creating a recipe from that. That is what I did in this case. I toyed with the idea of making cherry chicken salad served on a croissant, then I considered granola bars with cherries and other fruits and nuts in it. Then the other night I made a recipe I found on TastefullySimple.com. The recipe used a TS Absolutely Almond cake mix, caramel ice cream topping, chocolate chips, evaporated milk, etc. It is baked like a layer bar with half the almond cake batter on the bottom, the caramel and chocolate in the middle. The rest of the cake batter is put on top and baked like a yummy, gooey deep dish pizza dessert...or cookie bar. That turned out really well. I used that recipe as my inspiration for my cherry contest recipe entry. I thought the flavor of the almond in the cake mix would pair nicely with cherries. So, I revised the recipe to use cherry pie filling instead of caramel sauce. I also attempted to make my own version of the Absolutely Almond cake mix using a yellow cake mix and almond extract. All in all, the end product turned out more like a cake than a cookie bar... So, with just minutes to spare until I had to turn my "piece" in I changed the name of my entry from Chocolate Cherry Cookie Bars to Chocolate Cherry Swirl Cake. I figured I could "make lemonade out of lemons" by changing the name and I would still have something to turn in to the contest. That's what I did. The contest judges "Presentation, Taste, Appearance, Skill and Originality." To make my cake stand out a little bit from the others I "plated it" (don't I sound like a pro. Ha!!!) on a cranberry red (or shall I say a cherry red?) square plate with rounded edges. I cut four large corner pieces out of the cake and placed them together to match the shape of the plate. I typed up my recipe and added some photographed images of cherries and chocolate chips to give it some appearance. I framed the recipe in a 4x6 acrylic photo frame that will sit in front of my cake. So, the red in the cake, the red in the plate and the red in the recipe all looked cute together and went with the whole cherry theme. I can totally see how the contestants on those competition shows you see on the Food Network get really nervous during their contests. I got a little nervous doing mine because I felt like I was racing the clock, especially when my recipe didn't turn out as expected. I can't imagine having a camera and an audience watching my every move! So, it's been fun to do this contest. We'll see how this one goes. I don't expect to take home any of the prizes, but I will really excited if I do. Prizes range from a $100 gift card to our chamber of commerce (the gift card can be used at a large number of the local businesses), a large gift basket of products from the kitchen store who sponsored the event, a gift card to a free cooking class at the cooking store, etc, etc. There are three prizes given in each age category... Sadly enough.. I now qualify for the oldest age category available. :(

I did come up with one trick when I was preparing to transport this cake. As I said above, I had to placed on a plate and I wanted to transport it inside my cake carrier, but the surface of the cake carrier and the bottom of the plate were both very slick, so I put one of those silicone hot pads between the two and the plate did not move while I was driving. Yay!

My cake is shown below. It actually looks much more appetizing in person...Needless to say, I won't be entering a photo contest any time soon. Ha!!