Black Forest cake. Black Forest torte, Black Forest gateau. Black Forest nightmare.
I hear it spoken about on the Great British Baking Show enough that I wanted to make it and see what all the hoopla is about. En premièrement, the layers of the cake must be flat and not domed as most layer cakes are. Not having dome is accomplished by putting an insulating belt around the pans before they go into the oven, don’t you know. You can buy these or make them with wet paper towel and aluminum foil. Even as I write this I am thinking are you seriously out of your mind? But I did this, saving the pan girdles, as I think of them, for next time.
Then I made the chocolate cake. It’s supposed to be a sponge but after reading the various recipes (one used 9 eggs for crap’s sake) I decided just to use my tried and true Nigella Lawson cake. I don’t know if it’s a “sponge” cake but it’s chocolate so, whatever. I baked them and they were fine. Not domed. Anyway.
A black forest cake (or whatever) is frosted with whipped cream. The layers are cut in half, brushed with cherry liqueur, spread with whipped cream and then each layer is topped with cherries. In this case Luxardo cherries which, aside from costing approximately a month’s rent, are exquisitely delicious.
After they cooled, I put the cakes in the (now cool) oven to get them out of the way whilst I prepped the rest of folderol and hoopla. Sometime later, also prepping for the dinner I turned the oven on to preheat…see where I am heading here.
Deuxièmement, The cakes got a second baking which really isn’t what’s supposed to happen. At all. Fortunately I caught a whiff of baking chocolate and whisked them outside into snow (see pix below) in what I imagine was a less than, oh let’s say, red-blooded American male-ish sort of way, with some accompanying hyperventilating and strangled gasping. They were fine it turned out and who the hell is going to know under all that alcohol, cherry and whipped cream.
After you get the whipped cream onto the fucking thing, you melt chocolate, wipe it onto baking paper and freeze it. Once it’s frozen you crack the chocolate and arrange it around the cake and on top in the way a professional football player might do.
Troisièmement. I have succeeded in getting myself into a straight jacket, am awaiting sedation and hoping that convulsive electroshock therapy cures me of this.
The cake, though, was spectacular.
