I was going to name this cake after Becky Sharp, the social-climbing heroine of Vanity Fair. It’s Betty Crocker Devil’s Food made good with stiff-peaked egg whites and a slug of kirsch in the batter. Pillows of chantilly-lightened cherry curd, a necklace of sugar pearls and a tiara of red cherries complete the upgrade.

If the finished cake recalled anyone, though, it was a young George Washington. Reader, I cannot tell a lie: I put so much salt in the cherry curd I had to throw the whole thing out.

I got arrogant. I thought that my culinary arts diploma meant I could administer a pinch of salt directly from the box. I might as well have been salting a pavement. But two eggs, a pound of cherries and a good slab of butter had gone into that curd! No matter that a lick of the stirring spoon was enough to turn my stomach; I managed to convince myself that with enough sweet cream, the salt would eventually fade into the background.

What you see oozing from between layers of perfectly good chocolate cake is a cream filling at least four shades paler than I had planned, cherry in name only and salt in every other way. Until the briny end, I clung to my conviction that the chocolate flavor would somehow overwhelm the salty filling, or at least work with it to produce a cherried version of the fleur de sel caramel that’s so de rigueur right now.

Nope.

For all my work, I ended up with a handful of cherries I had to rinse off before eating.

Having said that, the meringue-lightened chocolate box cake was really quite nice prior to tainting. If you’re like me and envision hell as an eternity of weighing and sifting dry ingredients, you might like this tip for improving store-bought cake mix, which was taught to me by one of Traci Des Jardins‘ former line cooks. For a lighter, fluffier crumb, separate the eggs and beat the whites to stiff peaks–the addition of a few tablespoons of sugar will help–before gently folding them into the batter. It doesn’t hurt to add a few extra egg whites (save the yolks for something else) to the eggs called for on the box. And a good splash of liqueur will blur the vanilla flavoring that can be particularly harsh in yellow cake mix.

Most of you can ignore these final tips, which are mainly for myself: keep your salt in a ramekin, and a pinch should be just that.

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