Wintery Pavlova with Port Cranberries and Rosemary #CakeSliceBakers

This month's choice featured three winter-themed cakes - spicy eggnog, chocolate peppermint, and this cranberry topped pavlova. All three appealed to me, but I needed something that required hands on time, so the pavlova was the obvious choice. I have, however, added the other two cakes to make "bake this soon" list so am looking forward to reading how they went for others.

This recipe calls for creating a Swiss meringue for the pavlova, and I am a fan! I should have taken a picture of the unbaked meringue because I felt quite successful with how thick and shiny my meringue turned out to be. It piled up beautifully on my baking sheet. The recipe calls for baking for 2 hours and then leaving in the turned off oven for several more hours. 

The cranberry topping includes dried cherries in addition to the cranberries and is flavored with five-spice seasoning. I did not have any port in my cupboard, but I did have a bottle of blackberry wine from Shenandoah National Park, so I added that to the compote. When we were ready to taste the pavlova, I whipped up some cream, piled that onto the pavlova and then topped with cranberry combo.



This was a big hit in my family. The cranberries helped balance the sweetness from the meringue perfectly. The only problem I had was cutting it. It was pretty sticky inside, so my knife would not cut neatly, and we ended up with piles of delicious dessert instead of neat wedges of pavlova. The internet tells me this is likely because my house was too humid which certainly is a possibility. But piles of dessert taste just as good as neat wedges, so no one cared.






Each month The Cake Slice Bakers are offered a selection of cakes from the current book we are baking through. This year it is The Cake Book: Beautiful Sweet Treats for Every Craving by Rebecca Firth. We each choose one cake to bake, and then on the 20th - never before - we all post about our cake on our blogs. There are a few rules that we follow, but the most important ones are to have fun and enjoy baking & eating cakes!

Follow our Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest pages where you can find all of our cakes, as well as inspiration for many other cakes. You can also click on the links below to take you to each of our cakes. If you have a blog and are interested in joining The Cake Slice Bakers and baking along with us, please send an email to thecakeslicebakers at gmail dot com for more details.

The Cake Slice Bakers also have a new Facebook group called The Cake Slice Bakers and Friends. This group is perfect for those who do not have a blog but want to join in the fun and bake through this book.






It is a new year and a new book - The Cake Book: Beautiful Sweet Treats for Every Craving - and our choices for November 2024 were ~

Spiced Eggnog Cake with Rum Buttercream

Wintery Pavlova with Port Cranberries

Chocolate Peppermint Bûche de Noël
  • No one from the group choose to bake this cake






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