Black Forest Cherry Cake (Schwarzwälder Kirsch)

Black Forest cake, also known as Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte is a well known German dessert, with tons of different recipes how to make it. The one I use is a bit adapted recipe from the 70-ties cook book. While some of this can seem like a bit of an advanced magic, it is really not that difficult to puzzle out once you are busy with it. A note though, it is not a cake that is well suitable for a star shape cake, like the one I made in the picture, as it is rather soft and soggy cake, which does not keep sharp edges that well. Normal round shape is no problem at all, I suppose classic look, with black chocolate sprinkle on sides or top and cherries is a thing to go for.
Since you normally bake a cake part and then cut it into 3 layers, this recipe is for 24 cm cake form, if you want bigger or smaller diameter, adjust proportions accordingly.

Need:
Cake biscuit part:
150 g of black chocolate (70% cacao)
150 g of butter
150 g sugar powder
2 satchels of vanilla sugar (10 g each, can do with one)
6 eggs
150 g flour
1 satchel of baking powder

Filling part:
1 liter of cherry compote (aka full jar of sour cherries, without pits, swimming in syrup/juice)
2 table spoons of starch
5 spoons of sugar
5 spoons of kirsch (or any other cherry liqueur). If you are not familiar with kirschwasser, it is a form of cherry vodka, 40% strong and clear. It can be substituted with sweeter cherry liqueur or fruit brandy, or, just pouring vodka on cherry leaves and leaving it for 1-2 days.

Cream part:
1 liter of cream for whipping
50 g sugar
1 satchel of vanilla sugar

Decoration part
Chocolate sprinkles, a few nice fresh or candied cherries to put on top.

Start with making the cake part. 150g chocolate has to be broken into smaller pieces and melted in a hot water bath. For that, you take a smaller pot or bowl, put the chocolate in it, so that most of it touches the pot surface on the bottom, and then place it into a larger pot, with hot water. Chocolate will slowly melt.
Room temperature butter has to be beaten with 150 g of sugar powder. If you never have done that, you do it with the same mixer whisk as what you use for the whipped cream, in the beginning it tends to cling to it and look a bit scary and wrong, but further it softens and fluffs up. It takes about 5 to 10 min to beat it well, until it doubles in size more or less, and turns white(ish).

Separate your egg yolks from whites. Add yolks one by one to the butter mix, beating with the same whisk. Add chocolate to the mix at the end.

Beat the egg whites separately, till they are stiff.

Add sifted flour to the chocolate mix. You have to sift it, because it ensures the fluffiness of the cake and can make really really significant difference to the end result. DO NOT SKIP that step, ever, when making cakes.
Slowly add egg whites to the chocolate mix, stir it slowly, with a hand or a spoon. Do not use mixer by all means, it will mess things up.

Take your cake form, add baking paper on the bottom (or use the form that does not leak). Bake for about 1 hour in 160C oven (always put cake into already pre-warmed oven). When it is ready, cool it off and cut into 3 layers with a bread knife (the tricky part, but even if it is not a perfect cut, it still can work just fine inside the cake).

When cake part is ready and cooled off, start with the filling. Separate the cherries from the syrup. Ideally there would be about 2 cups of syrup, but if there is less, add water to it.

Cherries: First take 1 cup of syrup and mix it with starch and 3 spoons of sugar, so that there are no lumps. We do this when it is cold, as it is much easier to evenly add starch that way. This cup we put to boiling, so starch can thicken it up, cook it for about 1 min after it boils, stirring vigorously so it does not burn on the bottom. Then we wait for it to cool off a bit, mix in 3 spoons of kirsch and add cherries, so they get coated with the mix.

Syrup: Then take 2nd cup with syrup, put it to boil with 2 spoons of sugar, when it is a bit cooled, add 2 spoons of kirsch to it.

Last is the cream part, when everything else is ready. Before you whip the cream, cool it off well in the fridge or even throw it in a freezer for 10-ish minutes. If cream is warm, you will get a butter, not a whipped cream. So, whip the cool cream with added sugar and vanilla sugar and then the cake is ready to be assembled.

First sprinkle all 3 cake layers with a syrup we made from the 2nd cup of cherry syrup. It is nice to use some tool to spray it, but in an absence of it, just pour it on a cake layer with a table spoon, so it gets soaked evenly.

Put a layer of cake on the plate you are going to serve it on, or on a circle of a baking paper if you plan to transfer it to a proper plate later. Add a layer of cherries filling (the one we made from 1st syrup cup), a layer of whipped cream, second layer of cake, a layer of cherry filling, a layer of whipped cream, a last layer of cake (the prettiest one) and a layer of whipped cream. Basically you need to split cherry filling in 2 parts and whipped cream into 3 parts. Fix the sides of the cake with the whipped cream as well.

Put it in a fridge for half an hour at least and then decorate it. I usually leave decoration for the day I plan to serve it (usually the next day, everything has to soak through overnight), because sometimes the moisture in the fridge can ruin the decoration. If I want to decorate the top with whipped cream, I make some extra, using a fixer for it to be more stiff and hold form better. Big black fresh cherries look awesome on top, but sky is a limit for how to make it pretty.