Schwarzwälderkirschtorte (Black Forest Cake)

Alicia here taking over Lindsey's Renny's Recipes regularly scheduled post, and posting about a delicious dessert I have made.

This is my last German recipe post as part of my international meal planning posts. It has been so fun trying new foods, and it's made me excited to visit Germany one day.

Next month is Ecuador, and although we have posted a few Ecuadorian recipes on here before, these will be dinner recipes that you'll most definitely want to try. So stay tuned next week for that.

Black Forest Cake

But back to today's dessert, Schwarzwälderkirschtorte, This means Black Forest Cherry Torte in Germany. Invented in the 1920's by a Josef Keller, this is a decadent cake with dark chocolate, sour cherries, and Kirsch (usually). Kirsch is a kind of cherry brandy, making the cake not suitable for children (usually).

If you've been following our blog awhile you may have noticed that we don't drink alcohol, so you can consider this recipe a ''dry'' Black Forest Cake. A delicious treat the whole family can enjoy. In place of the Kirsch, I used tart cherry juice. It was mixed with apple juice, but I soaked the cherries in the juice, which deepened the cherry flavor. I've linked to the juice I used.

This cake was soooooo good. My husband said it is worth the calories to have a piece. I must say that I agree. Plus it's got cherries, so that's fruit and all the antioxidants in the chocolate, I mean, can we really say this cake is all that unhealthy. ;)

If you want to make this cake be sure to plan accordingly. This is an all day, if not an overnight two day kind of cake. I think I took about 4-5 hours of active time working on the cake. So that's not including the cherries soaking for about 6 hours. If you want really deep flavors, allow the cherry juice to soak into the cake overnight before icing it on the outside.

I had some black cherries in my freezer from awhile ago. The package had started to go bad so I saved what I could and threw the rest out. So I only had about a cup and a half of cherries. Which means my cherry filling was pretty skimpy. I made it into a compote to stretch it a bit farther and that worked well. But I think 3 cups of cherries would be ideal for this cake. Because usually there would be cherries on top of the cake as well.

Don't use cherry pie filling! It's too sweet. Every thing I've read about this cake, Germans always lamented the use of cherry pie filling in a Black Forest Cake. Don't get me wrong, I love a good chocolate cake with cherry pie filling, but it's not for this cake. This cake isn't supposed to be very sweet. For this same reason I wouldn't use cherry cocktail, I think it would be too sweet.

Another issue I ran into was that I added too much liquid to my frosting for the filling. It was still delicious, but it did get a little runny and grainy. So add your cherry juice a little bit at a time in order to not have my same problem. It was good with the ratio I put in the recipe.

My final tip is to use your food processor (if you have one) to shave your chocolate. I tried doing it by hand on my cheese grater and it produced beautiful chocolate swirls, but also was really awkward and took forever. I put the grater blade (big side up) in my food processor, and it wasn't as beautiful but was so much easier and faster. In the center of my cake I used a dark chocolate bar cut into triangles to make an abstract kind of forest. I think it turned out pretty cute.

Dry Black Forest Cake

I loved this cake, I'm already thinking about when I should make it again. It was so good. I know you can't see from the pictures, but the special dark cocoa made the layers almost black. And the flavor was so deep and complex. I think it would be a great Valentine's Day dessert.