Black forest cake

Recipe

Black forest cake - Liv for cake

• I used frozen cherries that had been thawed in the fridge, instead of fresh.

• I also made buttermilk instead of buying it.

How it turned out

Actually great! The cake was very chocolatey and moist, and kept well in the fridge for the week it took us to eat it.

She starts the recipe by saying it's an easy one. And while the cake itself was very straightforward, all the other elements that go into the cake did take me quite a bit of time. Even by prepping some of them before (like the cherry liqueur, buttermilk, and the chocolate collar), it probably was an additional 3 hours from start to finish.

What I learned

Trust the recipe. I was skeptical of using all of the cherry liqueur syrup, out of fear that the cake would become too soggy. So I ended up using about half. Turns out, the only ding against the cake was that the cherry flavours weren't coming through very strongly. So next time, I will trust the recipe and use all the syrup.

Whipped cream desserts look nice at first, but can get messy quickly. I really took my time whipping the heavy cream so that it would stay firm for as long as possible. And it did okay, but still got melty after a bit. I used canned whipped cream on the top for the decorative swirls. That melted off nearly as soon as the cherry was placed on top of them. Next time I'm working with whipped cream, I'll look into making a stabilized version and definitely save the canned whipped cream for topping coffee instead of cake.