Cranberry & Dried Cherry Coffee Cakes

I MISS GOURMET MAGAZINE! It isn’t funny anymore. A year or more without them just isn’t the same. They were SO MUCH BETTER than Bon Appetit, that more populist publication with generally less appealing recipes and articles… Thank goodness for SAVEUR, which is really finding its stride lately, making up for some of the vacuum left by Gourmet’s departure. I can’t pinpoint the problem exactly, but if I had to make a sweeping generalization, it is that Gourmet Magazine was targeted at folks comfortable with either U.S. coast, the East or the West, and anyone who lived in between that probably felt equally at home on one of the coasts… Hardly anything in between, otherwise. Whereas Bon Appetit reaches out to a broader audience. I almost always found a couple of recipes in each issue of Gourmet that I wanted to try, and when I did, was often very happy with the results… but that isn’t the case with Bon Appetit… I was browsing through a March 2011 issue of Bon Appetit and spied a simple sounding espresso pound cake with cranberries and nuts. We have a veritable bounty of dried fruits and nuts that came in balikbayan boxes over the past two weeks, so I was on the lookout for potential uses.

I made them on a slow Saturday morning. They turned out looking terrific. Very photogenic.

But they didn’t look like the photos in the magazine, nor did they taste fantastic, in my opinion.

Even after a day where the coffee flavor seemed more intense, I’d say the cakes were just a 7.5 or 8.0 out of 10 maybe…

…mind you, with a cup of tea or coffee and slumped down in front of the television, it wasn’t inedible. :) But if I had to take a wild guess, Bon Appetit’s photo wasn’t of a real cooked cake as one would have made at home. I suspect some food styling hocus pocus given their bizarrely perfect and even hued dissolved light brown glaze… Original recipe here if you still want to try it…