Week 9: Black Forest Cake

This was a busy week, since it was our first week making an entire cake.  We baked the cake, torted, filled, masked and decorated it. 

I found out that my partner has dropped the class, but another person was partnerless for the day, so we paired up.  As a pair, we made three devil's food cakes.  One each and a spare incase something went wrong.

Devil's food cake is just a special name for moist chocolate cake.  The recipe was straight forward and yeilded 3 - 7 inch rounds.  Once the cakes were baked, we immeditely flipped them out of the pans onto cake rounds and put them into the
blast chiller.

While the cakes were cooling, we made the whipped cream for the icing.  We had the choice of using commerical grade whipped topping (what we used in Week 4), whipping cream, or a mixture of both.  I chose to use mainly whipping cream with a little bit of whipped topping for sweetness and stability.

When the cakes were sufficiently cooled, we leveled the top of the cake, cut it into 3 layers (torted) and brushed each layer with a kircsh flavoured simple syrup.  This helps keep the cake moist and adds more flavour.

We piped multiple concentric rings of icing on each layer and filled the gaps with cherry filling.  This was done twice and the top layer was inverted to get a level top.  We used a ready made cherry filling, but if I was to do this again, I would make it from scratch.          

Then it was time to mask the cake.  We didn't actually spend too much time on this step as most of the cake was going to be covered anyways.  A big block of chocolate circulated around the room and we each used our knives to make chocolate shavings.

Since our spare cake turned out well, we decided to decorate it as well and each take home half.  Here's how it turned out:

It's too bad my half didn't last the drive home...oh well, I think it still tasted good.