BLACK FOREST CAKE

HIS BLACK FOREST CAKE COMBINES RICH CHOCOLATE CAKE LAYERS WITH FRESH CHERRIES, CHERRY LIQUEUR, AND A SIMPLE WHIPPED CREAM FROSTING.

Black Forest Cake was a staple when I was growing up (much to my dismay…read on). You know, the grocery store kind with the nuclear red maraschino cherries? My mom loooooved that cake and always got it for her birthday, and often at other times throughout the year as well. This was epically disappointing to me. Why on earth would you ruin a perfectly delicious cake with those sickly sweet, sticky, artificial tasting cherries? Whyyyyy? Needless to say, I ate around them, but they totally tainted the cake and frosting. Sad times. Now that I think about it, it’s probably been a good 20-25 years since I’ve had that cake.

I’ve talked about my disdain for maraschino cherries before, and that feeling still holds true to this day. I have caved and used them as garnish because, I will admit, they look pretty and just go with certain desserts, but they get plucked right off before eating the cake.

Thing is, I actually love cherries. Real cherries. Fresh cherries. They are one of my favourite summer seasonal fruits. So, I set off to re-create the decades old Black Forest Cake my way.

 

I promise you, this is one of the easiest cakes you will make. It looks fancier than it is, and the chocolate bark was actually dead easy to make. The trickiest part of this cake is making sure you don’t have any lingering cherry pits in your cherries, which totally happened due to a less-than-stellar cherry pitter that broke after about 10 cherries. Needless to say, it got returned.

So, super easy chocolate cake, a simple whipped cream for frosting, and fresh cherries. That’s really all you need. In order to keep it traditional, I also made a cherry syrup (using kirsch – cherry liqueur) to brush onto the cake layers. You can leave this out if you’d like to keep it kid-friendly, or use a non-alcoholic cherry syrup.

The chocolate bark on the side of the cake is much easier to make than it looks. I first saw this on my friend Janette’s Irish Chocolate Cake. She has a video tutorialto show you how to make it, and I basically followed her steps: melt chocolate, spread on parchment, chill, unroll. The only difference is that I popped mine into the freezer for 20mins instead of the fridge for 30mins because I’m mega impatient.

I actually didn’t think it would work out, to be honest, since it was my first time trying it and all, but it worked great! I actually thought my pieces were too big/thick and was thisclose to re-melting it and trying it again, but after I placed them on the cake they looked perfect.

You will have to work quickly with this chocolate bark — since the chocolate isn’t tempered, it will melt on contact. I recommend using food safe latex gloves so that you’re not touching the chocolate directly. It will help a ton. I also popped the chocolate shards back in the fridge/freezer here and there to cool them off — it was a hot day too, so that didn’t help my plight. At one point I actually had the cake and bark in the fridge and was placing the shards on the cake with the fridge door open (lol). Desperate times. Is it Fall yet??

I used a vegetable peeler on a block of chocolate to create the chocolate shavings on top, and then used a 1M tip to pipe rosettes out of the whipped cream on top. Really though, you could skip all the bells and whistles and just do a rustic frosting job with the whipped cream.

If you’re a Black Forest Cake fan, I hope you try this version! And if you’re not, maybe this recipe will convert you. It is much better than the ones you can get at the grocery store, I promise!