Black Forest cake

Dark chocolate sponge, brandy-soaked morello-style cherries, fresh whipped cream, dark chocolate shards on top. This is the recipe we use at the studio in Madokero when someone asks how ours is made. It is written for an intermediate home baker with three 8-inch tins, a domestic oven, and about an hour and a half of time. Kirsch is the traditional brush. Brandy is the easy swap in Harare and does the same job.

TL;DR

• Three 8-inch chocolate sponges, brushed with brandy or kirsch syrup, layered with morello-style cherries and softly whipped cream.
• Active time about 30 minutes. Bake 28 to 32 minutes. Total under two hours, plus cooling.
• Serves 12.
• No kirsch? A clean grape brandy works. For an alcohol-free version, use reduced cherry juice with vanilla.

Ingredients (for three 8-inch sponges and the filling)

Sponge

• 300g (about 2 and a half cups) plain flour
• 60g (about half a cup) cocoa powder, sifted, the darker the better
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• Half a teaspoon fine salt
• 300g (1 and a third cups) caster sugar
• 250g (1 and an eighth cups) softened butter
• 5 large eggs, room temperature
• 250ml (1 cup) full-cream milk, room temperature
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Cherry filling and syrup

• 2 x 400g tins of morello-style cherries, drained, juice reserved
• 60g (about a third of a cup) caster sugar
• 60ml (about a quarter cup) brandy or kirsch
• A squeeze of lemon, optional

Cream layer and finish

• 600ml (2 and a half cups) double cream, cold
• 50g (a heaped third of a cup) icing sugar
• 200g 70% dark chocolate, for the shards
• A small handful of glace cherries, for the rim
• A few fresh cherries on the stem, if in season, for the centre

A note on sourcing in Harare. Brandy is everywhere. Kirsch is rare. Use a clean grape brandy and do not lose sleep over it. Tinned morello-style cherries turn up at Food Lover's and Bon Marche most weeks. If jarred morellos are scarce, the tinned ones work, and the syrup from the tin is the start of your brushing syrup. Stick to 70% dark chocolate for the shards. Anything higher than 75% snaps into dust the second you try to plate it.

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 175 C. Grease and line three 8-inch tins on the base and the sides.
2. Cream the butter and sugar until pale and noticeably lighter, about 4 minutes on medium-high. Do not rush this. The lift in the sponge comes from properly creamed butter, not the baking powder.
3. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well between each. If the mixture splits, add a spoonful of the weighed flour and carry on.
4. Sift the flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt together. Fold into the batter in three additions, gently, with a large metal spoon.
5. Pour in the milk and vanilla. Fold until just smooth. Stop the moment the streaks disappear.
6. Divide between the three tins (a kitchen scale helps here, around 380g per tin). Level the tops. Bake on the middle shelf, 28 to 32 minutes, until a skewer in the centre comes out with a few moist crumbs and not raw batter. Cocoa-heavy sponges go from done to dry quickly, so check at 28.
7. Cool in the tins for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a rack and leave until completely cold. Do not assemble while the sponges are still warm. The cream will weep.
8. Drain the cherries and reserve the juice. Put the juice in a small saucepan with the 60g sugar. Reduce over a medium heat to about a third of its volume, until it coats the back of a spoon thinly. Off the heat, stir in the brandy or kirsch and the squeeze of lemon. Cool.
9. Whip the cold cream with the icing sugar to soft peaks, not stiff. Stiff cream goes grainy in a layered cake and breaks under its own weight by the time the third sponge goes on.
10. Build on a cake board. Sponge, brush generously with syrup, a thick layer of cream, scatter half the drained cherries, second sponge, brush, cream, the rest of the cherries, third sponge, brush, top with cream. Crumb-coat the sides with a thin layer of cream.
11. Pipe cream rosettes around the rim. Tuck a glace cherry between each rosette. Pile the chocolate shards in the middle. If you have fresh cherries on stems, two or three on top earn the photograph.

How to make the chocolate shards

Melt the 200g of dark chocolate gently, either in 20-second microwave bursts stirring between each, or in a bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Spread it thin (about 2mm) on a strip of baking paper using an offset spatula or the back of a spoon. Let it set somewhere cool for 20 minutes.

The shards want to be set but still bendy when you snap them. Slide the paper into the fridge for 5 minutes to firm them up, then snap them by hand into uneven shards. Tempering is overkill here. The shards do not need to be glossy because they are being snapped, not sliced.

A note on kirsch, brandy, and the alcohol-free version

Kirsch is the traditional brush for Black Forest, a clear cherry brandy from the same region of Germany that gave the cake its name. It is rare in Harare and expensive when it does turn up. A clean grape brandy does the same job at a fraction of the cost. The cake stops being strictly traditional and starts being practical, which is fine by us.

For an alcohol-free Black Forest, skip the spirit in the syrup and replace it with a teaspoon of good vanilla extract. You lose a little warmth and the boozy lift the cherries get from the kirsch, but it still reads as Black Forest, not as a chocolate cake with cherries on top. The trick is to reduce the cherry juice a little further so the syrup carries the cake.

What to do if your cream splits

Usually one of three things. You overwhipped (the most common). The bowl was warm, or the kitchen is hot, which is a real risk on a Harare summer afternoon. Or the cream itself was close to its date and the fat had separated a little in the carton.

Fix: take a few tablespoons of fresh, cold, unwhipped cream and fold it gently into the split bowl. Stop the second it comes back together. Do not whisk it back in, fold. If it has gone fully buttery, you have made cream cheese frosting's distant cousin, and the easiest thing is to start the cream layer again with a fresh carton. Keep the bowl in the fridge for 10 minutes before you whip the next lot.

Storage and serving

Keep the assembled cake in the fridge, in a sealed box if you have one big enough, for up to three days. The sponge dries fastest at the cut face. Press a piece of cling film flush to the cut edge between slicings and it will stay moist for the next day's tea.

Take the cake out of the fridge 20 to 30 minutes before serving. Cream eats best just below room temperature, and the cherries taste of more once the cold edge has come off. Slice with a long, thin knife wiped clean between cuts so the cream stays where it should.

When you would rather we baked it

Three sponges, the syrup, the cream, the shards, then assembly. That is a Saturday morning. If your Saturday is already spoken for, the studio version is from $40 for a 6-inch (serves 8 to 10), $50 for an 8-inch, and $60 for a 10-inch. You can order one from the studio with a day's notice. WhatsApp Beverley at +263 78 432 0632 with the date and size. We also do a buttercream finish, which holds up better than fresh cream for an outdoor party in October.

If chocolate cake is the brief but the cherries are not, the Death by Chocolate recipe goes the other direction: all chocolate, no fruit. And if you want to bake your way through the studio's signature flavours, Herman Canadian cake is the next obvious one. The rest of our recipes live in the recipe index, and our signature cake range covers the thirteen flavours we keep on the books year-round.