With a cherry on top. And bottom. And middle.

Made this for my sister’s birthday (shh, don’t tell her, she doesn’t know about this yet). Very yummy and so easy (if you don’t count searching for the correct cherries)! But, I don’t understand why every time there has to be something I don’t realize on my own — until it’s too late: The cherry can warned that there could be some stones left. When I was adding the cherries I thought, “should I really mix these in whole like this?” and I figured yes because the recipe didn’t instruct to mash them with a fork or anything. Just my luck, there were some stones left. Next time — and there will definitely be a next time — I’ll mash the cherries a bit and try to remove any unpleasant surprises.

250 g butter, softened
2 decilitres sugar
3 eggs
3 decilitres flour
1 decilitres potato starch flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons vanilla sugar*
100 g white chocolate
about 350 g canned sour cherries, drained (the jar I bought was 680 g, of which there were 350 g of cherries, rest was syrup); not the disgusting unnaturally red candied cherries (maraschino?)!

Whip butter and sugar until fluffy.
Mix in eggs one at a time (mix well after each egg).
Mix dry ingredients and then add them into the batter.

Put 1/3 of the batter in a separate bowl and stir in chocolate (either melted or chopped finely).
Stir cherries into the rest of the batter.

Grease and flour a cake tin (I used a spray for the first time and it worked wonderfully, I didn’t use flour). Put a layer of the cherry batter into the tin, add the white chocolate batter next, and then the rest of the cherry batter. (I actually used two small 1.2-litre tins.)
Bake in 150 degrees Celsius for about an hour.

* Apparently vanilla sugar is not so common outside of certain European countries. You can replace this with vanilla extract: ehow.com suggests 1/2-1 tsp of extract per 1 cup of sugar. There’s less than a cup of sugar used here so 1/2 tsp should do. If in doubt, leave it out. :)

(Found the recipe here [in Finnish].)