The Story of a Black Forest Cake…

I am feeling so brimmed up with emotions today… My little blog seems to be firing left and right and before I could really realize, I am on post #200!!! It feels like just yesterday that I had posted my post #150… I just cannot thank enough for all you lovely visitors who have kept coming to my space to read my ramblings, appreciate my recipes, try them out and suggest their honest feedback, good and bad. It is all of you that keeps me going on with this blog, even though in between, there has been times when I have really thought about giving myself a break from blogging. Seriously, working, house work, cooking, clicking and blogging can be really back breaking at times, but then, I always prefer to look at my blog as a way of stress relief, and so I don’t want to even thing that it is a part of my normal schedule!!!

Wondering what I should be sharing on this special occasion of mine, I thought, why not the cake that I just recently baked and frosted completely with my own hands. After the Eggless Tiramisu Cake, which will be one cake which will be close to my heart till the next one comes, a bake that I really enjoyed was this Black Forest Cake that I baked as a part of a surprise for my parents when they come back from home, for their anniversary. I would not say that the cake making was a “cake walk” – it was much messier than I expected it to be!!!

But what’s the fun when there is no mess? This cake gave me lot of heart attacks, but somehow I managed to overcome a lot of hassles to finish off the cake in a very rugged style. Don’t the cake looks so??? 🙂

PinI’m not going to type any recipe here – it is going to be more of a story. That’s why I titled it as “The Story of a BFC”!!! I would love to let the world know that food bloggers normally don’t consider themselves as amazing cooks, it’s just their passion for cooking that they share online. I always share my recipes that I have got a positive response about, whether it’s my family or my colleagues. Positive can be through words and through gestures. If I get an inkling that they haven’t liked it, it doesn’t get featured over here! Simple as that… I am bound by all the insecurities of a novice cook, who is always nervous as to whether my creation would turn out to be the way I want. And Alhamdulillah, most of the time it has. Some times so bad that I have had to trash it with a heavy heart. This keeps happening when you love to cook, doesn’t it?

OK, so starting off with the BFC, on day 1, I used the chocolate cake recipe from here as it is to bake the cake. The mistake I made? Instead of preheating and baking it at 160 degrees, I got my mental calculations wrong and preheated and baked at 180 degrees. The result, this…

PinI got a cake which had a huge crater on the top, but when I pocked the tester, it came out neat. I immediately posted it on my FB page and got a lot of tips from fellow bloggers. Thank you so much Swathi, Shazia, Usha, Shruti, Shabs and all who came up with what could be the reason. I understood my mistake only then! Since I baked it in a 26 cm springfom pan, as soon as I removed the sides and slowly moved the cake did I notice there was a center of uncooked batter!!! My oven ditched me again!!! 🙁 🙁 I was so disappointed, but then being the person I am who loves that half cooked batter, I tried my maximum to pull out the cake without causing much damage, slowly flipped it onto my cooling rack and cleaned up the base of my pan, simple as that!!! Once the cake cooled, I wrapped it in cling film and stored it in the fridge.

Day 2 and Day 3 were taken for frosting. What all did I use?

3 sachets of whipping powder, whipped as per pack instructions (approx 6 cups of whipped cream)
1 x 570 gm tin red cherries, liquid drained and kept aside
1 cup chocolate chips, melted
1/2 cup chocolate chips, for sprinkling

Now, having had a mess of the cake, I cut off the crack on the top to smoothen it and reserved the cut piece. Then I cut the cake in the center. The top portion was fine, but the bottom had a dent in between because of the half cooked batter. I covered it up with the piece that I took from the top portion of the cake. What is it called in science??? Hmm… horticulture??? Hehe… kind of something like that I suppose. I sprinkled half the reserved liquid onto the bottom of the cake. Then I spread a thick layer of whipped cream and sprinkled almost 60% of the cherries in the tin, cutting it into half and throwing away the seed. Then I put the top portion on top and brushed it with the remaining liquid and left the cake in the fridge for around an hour for it to soak up the liquid.

After that, I covered the whole cake with whipped cream generously, just leaving around a cup to do my improper rosettes on the top.  I left the cake overnight in the fridge to set.

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Finishing it off…

Oh, how could I forget to write about the chocolate collar??? I kept the melted chocolate chips ready in a ziplock bag, cut and pasted parchment paper to fit my cake and spread it on the dining table. I snipped off a tip and started drawing. As I got excited when two lines came out beautifully, the ziplock conveniently ripped off spilling out the chocolate! There you go, down the drain!!! No, wait a minute… if I don’t get a design, who cares! At-least let me get a collar done! With my bare hand, I just spread out the spilled melted chocolate all over the parchment paper and left it to cool for a few hours. Just before I left the cake in the fridge, I slowly balanced it and stuck it on the whipped cream on the sides and peeled off the parchment. The chocolate kept breaking in between, making me feel really bad about it, but then mishaps are a part of life, isn’t it?

The next day, after work, I did the piping on the top, which looked so amateurish – oh yes, I am one!!! 🙂 – and placed the remaining whole cherries in spaces I felt that it would look good. Finally sprinkled the chocolate chips all over the top and there it went back to the fridge for a day more. The day they landed and saw the cake, my umma didn’t know how to react. Actually, she hates bakes, can’t blame her much because she cannot have much of it due to her diabetes problem, even though she loves sweets. So I did get a small lecture for having made a huge cake to be eaten by just 6 of us. But then, as usually happens, we had guests and they were served slices of the cake, which they did enjoy, or as per what they told me!

All in all, it was an immensely satisfying experience, despite all the ups and downs. If you ask me whether I would consider making this again, yes I may, but then I’ve so many cake recipes to try in my hands that I’m not sure whether I would make this again! Let’s see, that’s all I can say….

Again expressing my gratitude to all of you for keeping me running till now… I wish to keep the same momentum going on till it is possible for me to take. You may see me going a bit low on action for a couple of weeks, due to a packed personal schedule, but that doesn’t mean that I will not be back. InShaAllah, with the Almighty’s Will, I will be back with full force once my schedule is back to it’s normal routine and track. Till then, this is one virtual piece of cake for all of you… Enjoy your days and keep in touch! 🙂