The batter deserves suspicion. Identical cherries can settle at the bottom of one cake and remain scattered through another because the surrounding mixture offers different resistance to movement. Gravity needs an accomplice. When fruit is denser than batter, its downward pull competes with buoyancy and the mechanical resistance of a mixture that is neither simply liquid nor solid.
Thickness tells only half. Viscosity describes resistance to flow, so a more viscous batter generally slows sedimentation, although slowing a cherry is not the same as stopping it. Yield stress changes matters. In a batter with this property, sustained flow begins only when applied stress exceeds a threshold; below it, the mixture can behave like a soft solid. Suspension becomes a contest. If the stress generated by a cherry's effective weight remains below what the surrounding batter can support, the fruit may stay put rather than merely descend more slowly.
The oven complicates appearances. A batter that holds cherries on the counter may lose resistance as warming changes its fat and structure, before starch gelatinization and protein coagulation set the cake. Timing beats surface tricks. Dusting fruit with flour may affect its immediate surroundings, but it cannot reliably compensate for a batter that offers too little resistance throughout the bake. Stillness must survive heating. By the time the crumb has set around each cherry, the cake has preserved a quiet record of whether gravity found an opening before the batter closed it.
