The German (or, in this case, Swiss-German) habit of running nouns together does sometimes lead you to a recipe that does exactly what it says on the tin: Basler Kirschenbrottorte (cherry-bread-cake from Basel) is, er, a cake whose two main ingredients are bread and cherries. And which comes from the city on the triple border between Switzerland, France and Germany. It’s surprisingly light for something which is not so far from a bread pudding, it’s fruity, cinnamon infused and bursts with flavour. This recipe comes from the food blog Helvetic Kitchen, where it’s accompanied by a nice family story to go with. I’ve halved the quantities.

To state the bleeding obvious, it isn’t cherry season in London right now, so I’ve gone for a 500g pack of frozen black cherries. This seemed to do the job OK, with the advantage that the cherries arrive already stoned, albeit with care needed to ensure that they were properly defrosted and with most of the surplus water dried off. However, I’m going to suggest that if you have fresh cherries growing anywhere near you, the way to go is definitely going to be to make this in season.

Warning: this recipe uses a lot of bowls. I can’t see an obvious way around this.

• 500g cherries
• 250 g leftover bread (in my case, this was the last of my Antiguan Sunday Bread)
• 200 ml milk
• vanilla paste or extract to taste
• 100 g biscuit crumbs – I used Digestive biscuits; in the US, one would probably go for Graham Crackers.
• 60 g butter
• 100 g sugar
• 3 large eggs (around 200g total)
• pinch of salt
• 50 g ground almonds
• 10 g flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• kirsch or fruit schnapps to taste

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1. If using frozen cherries, defrost them.
2. Preheat oven to 180℃.
3. Cut the bread into 1 cm cubes and put in a bowl.
4. Put the milk and vanilla into a saucepan and scald until very warm (80-90℃). Take off the heat and pour into a bowl to cool.
5. Remove the stones from the cherries, if this hasn’t been done for you already
6. Prepare a 20cm springform tin: line the bottom with baking paper, grease the sides generously with butter. 
7. Once the milk is at room temperature, pour it over the bread and squeeze it down so that all the bread has soaked up some milk.
8. Blitz your biscuits to a powder. Take about half the crumbs and spread them evenly over the base of the tin.
9. Cream the butter and sugar together.
10. Separate the eggs, pouring the whites into a bowl of your stand mixer, and the yolks into the butter-sugar mixture.
11. In yet another bowl, mix the remaining biscuit crumbs, ground almonds, flour, cinnamon and salt; stir until blended evenly.
12. Add the bread mixture into the butter-sugar mixture and mix.
13. Add in the flour mixture and mix until everything is very even.
14. Add the cherries and kirsch and mix.
15. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold in.
16. Pour the cake mix into your tin and bake for 40-45 minutes. If the cake looks like browning too far before the middle is cooked, cover it with foil for the last 5-10 minutes.
17. Remove and cool on a rack.

• Food