Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte

Grüß dich! This is Amelia 🙂

Ever since we learned about Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (black forest cherry cake) in our German class, we have wanted to make it. We haven’t made many cakes before, especially from scratch, so even though we knew that this cake would be a challenge, we wanted to give it a try.

From what I know, this cake is a popular German dessert that some Germans like to have on their birthdays. It is normally made with kirsch, which is alcoholic, so I found a recipe that substituted that with apple juice.

Here’s the recipe that we used: https://www.mydiversekitchen.com/recipe/an-alcohol-free-schwarzwalder-kirschtorte-or-black-forest-recipe-54793

To make the cake, we first melted the butter with the cocoa powder in a double boiler. Then we separated all four of the eggs.

Then we beat the egg yolks and sugar over a double-boiler, which we’d never done before. This cake was a new experience for us because we normally don’t put this much effort in our desserts!

Then we whipped the egg whites until they were soft peaks.

Next, we sifted the flour and baking powder into the egg yolk mixture…

…added the chocolate and the egg whites, and then carefully stirred it up. The recipe said to stir it very gently, but we definitely didn’t stir it enough because there were little pockets of white flour or egg all in our cake.

Next we baked the cake.

Then we made the whipped cream. We added cornstarch to it to thicken as the recipe called for. It only slightly changed the flavor.

Then we pitted the cherries and blended them with the apple juice for the cherry filling.

We transferred it to a pan to thicken on the stove. We had no idea how long to cook it, so it ended up not as thick as it should have been.

Next we cut the cake in half. We were supposed to cut it in thirds, but we didn’t have the right pan size, so our cake was thinner than it was supposed to be. Then we moistened our cakes with simple syrup.

We then iced the cake with our whipped cream. We were supposed to put the cherry filling on first, but we knew that we could never spread the whipped cream on top of it. We also made a border of whipped cream around the cake because we were scared the filling would spill out.

Then we put the cherry filling on the cake after it had completely cooled.

We weren’t sure exactly what chocolate we should get for the shavings, so we ended up getting a bar of Baker’s German’s sweet chocolate. We first softened the chocolate in the microwave, and then we made the chocolate shavings with a potato peeler.

Then we iced the cake with the remaining whipped cream and added 12 cherries on top.

Both Mattie and I were happy with how it turned out for being the most complicated cake we’ve made so far, but the recipe was also pretty hard to follow, so that added to the difficulty. Mattie liked how it tasted a little more than I did because I thought the cake seemed like it didn’t have much flavor and was a little dry. Mattie had said the whipped cream seemed to over power the cake flavor, but it was definitely still a good cake!

Surprisingly, we had no trouble with the filling pouring out of the cake once we cut it. We also ended up only using half of the filling because it was too runny to make it any thicker, so we ended up drizzling the rest on our individual slices.

Thanks for reading!

– Amelia