Black Forest Gateau

Having exhausted my taste for teabreads and loafs right now, I skipped ahead a few chapters to the cakes section of The Best of Mrs Beeton's Afternoon Tea.

I wanted a proper cake recipe that was a little challenging but not going to take 3 days to bake & decorate as I had a same-day delivery deadline to hit for a friends birthday.

I hit a snag early on when planning my black forest gateau bake - sourcing morello cherries. I live in central London so supermarkets might be plentiful but they're all small and stock only the bare essentials - morello cherries are not considered essential (but Opies pickled walnuts apparently are). Eventually I had to order two jars of Black Cherries in Kitsch from Amazon.

I also skipped buying kitsch and just used the slightly alcoholic juice from the jars as I couldn't find that either.

After baking one cake, I promptly realised it hadn't risen nearly enough. The recipe calls for you to cut the baked cake into 3 equal slices - I barely had enough to cut it into two. So, I baked a second cake.

Prepping the cherries seemed to take the most amount of time. Jarred cherries are already stoned, but that also meant they were a bit floppy from soaking in kitsch and I had to pick out the good looking ones for decoration. I also had to chop the uglier ones to be folded into the cream I whipped. My fingers and nails were stained a purple-red by the time I'd finished.

Whipping the creams took a few minutes too - but thank goodness for handheld mixers.

The penultimate step involved poking holes in the cakes (I did it with a chopstick) and "saturating" the cake with the cherry juice and kitsch. This was the step I was most concerned about as I couldn't tell if I'd poured in too much since at one point the cake almost cracked in half, yet I still had loads of juice left.

Two drenched cakes

Finally, I could sandwich the cream-cherry mixture between the two cakes and decorate.

Again, with only 2 cakes (as opposed to a cut up 3) I ended up with a bit more cream mixture than I knew what to do with

So, I used the extra to decorate the sides of the cake (it helped hide the uneven cake too) The top was covered in plain cream, whole(ish) cherries and some grated dark chocolate.

As this cake was for a friends birthday, I'd bought cake boards and a box to transport it in. We wrapped it up and carried on the tube to the pub in Clapham.

The pub kindly supplied us with plates and forks so we could serve it amongst the guests, but how many people does it take to cut a cake? Quite a few apparently:

I've actually never liked black forest gateau, but I was genuinely surprised by how delicious this one turned out. Without the additional kirsch the cake has only a hint of alcohol but not so much to hide the flavours of cherry, cream and chocolate cake. It wasn't too sweet or too boozy and lets just say that at the end of the night there wasn't much cake left for the Birthday Boy to take home as we'd eaten it all already!

Black Forest Gateau

150g margarine

150g caster sugar

3 eggs, beaten

few drops vanilla essence

100g self-raising flour

25g cocoa

pinch of salt

250ml double cream

125ml single cream

540g can morello cherries

kirsch

25g plain chocolate, grated

Line & grease a 20cm cake tin. Set oven to 180C

In a bowl, cream the margarine and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the eggs gradually, beating well after each addition. Stir in the vanilla essence.

Sift the flour, cocoa and salt into a bowl. Stir into the creamed mixture, lightly but thoroughly, until evenly mixed. Spoon into the tin and bake for 40minutes. Cool on a wire rack. When cold, cut the cake into 3 layers (or just bake another cake like I did.)

Make the filling. Combine the creams into a bowl and whip until stiff. Place half of the whipped cream into another bowl.

Drain the cherries, reserving the juice. Set aside 11 whole (or whole-ish) cherries and halve/stone the remainder. Gently fold the halved cherries into one of the bowls of cream. Strain the reserved cherry juice into a measuring jug and add kirsch to taste (I added none as the jarred cherries I bought were already soaked in it.)

Prick the cake layers and sprinkle with the cherry juice and kitsch until well saturated. Sandwich the layers together with the whipped cream and cherries. When assembled, cover with the remaining plain cream and use the whole cherries to decorate the top. Sprinkle the grated chocolate over the cream.