Cranberry-Orange Cake

I am completely besotted with this tea cake recipe from Sarah Mayor.  It is a fantastically moist and balanced cake.  Better yet, it is also fairly versatile.  Ms. Mayor suggests that one substitute other types of berries in lieu of raspberries.  Thanks to my local market being out of product, I did just that and the cake turned out very well.

Whirring away

 The hubs pronounced the raspberry-lemon loaf as one of the best cakes he has ever eaten, so I wanted to bake it again and take it to a party I had been invited to at the end of the week.  It was sure to be a hit.  Unfortunately, on the day I went to the store to purchase cake ingredients there were not only no raspberries, but NO berries at all to be had.  I didn't have time to flit from shop to shop in search of fresh berries, so I decided to substitute dried cranberries for raspberries and add orange zest in addition to the lemon zest that the recipe called for.  Again, I used quark instead of yogurt.  The cranberry-orange-quark cake went over really well with the Swiss folk at the party, so much so that, by the end of the night, the cake had been eaten up and one gal even asked me for the recipe.  I gladly sent her the above link to Ms. Mayor's tea loaf recipe.

The images below show the same cranberry-orange delight except this time I used cream cheese in lieu of quark or yogurt.  I hadn't actually wanted to use cream cheese, but I had forgotten to pick up quark at the store before throwing the ingredients together.  There just happened to be a bit of cream cheese tucked into the back of the fridge, so in it went.  I look forward to seeing how this latest incarnation of the loaf turned out!

Dense batter

1/3 of the batter

First layer of cranberries

Fresh from the oven