Saturday's gateau

After a modicum of deliberation Matt, my husband, decided that the cake that he would like to celebrate his birthday was a black forest gateau. This would mean that the cherries preserved in kirsch could finally be deployed, although candles would prove tricky.

I didn't underestimate the difficulty / time rating of this so Matt went out to do the shopping for his birthday luncheon while I stayed at home to do the baking. If this turned out to be less taxing than I suspected it could always be interspersed with gardening (hopefully), other aspects of food preparation(ok), or household chores (although not if I could avoid it).

I searched my recipe books and cuttings for suitable recipes. There were only two and one of them required me to sieve butter which seemed ridiculous so I went with the other one. I could tell that this was going to be a recipe that created extreme amounts of washing up. But still, it was a special occasion. And we do have a dishwasher.

To start with you have to melt some butter (I used butter substitute as I didn't want to risk the butter that smelt like cheese on such a critical bake) with sugar, chocolate and coffee. The recipe stated 200g of plain chocolate. I used a whole 150g bar and half a 100g bar. Yet the scales told me that this was 216g. So either the scales were wrong or the chocolate was wrong. I decided to give the chocolate the benefit of the doubt (I might revert to analogue scales once I've conducted a few experiments to see if the digital ones really are dubious) as 16g too much chocolate was likely to be less detrimental than 16g too little.

Then you have to wait until this is cool before adding the rest of the ingredients. This gave me time to do something that I don't usually bother with - sifting. Maybe I had sifting on the mind after I'd declined to sieve butter. For the first time in my life (I think) I did a recipe that used both plain and self-raising flour and it seemed to me important that they were properly mixed (along with the cocoa powder).

The chocolate mixture still didn't seem very cool to me so I had a pause in baking and potted up some tomato plants. I just love the smell of tomato plants.

Mixing the gateau

On returning to the kitchen I whisked the sifted ingredients into the (now cooled) chocolate mixture. It was a good job I had an apron on as it splashed all over the place. And then you whisk 2 eggs in - I suppose the reason you have to let the chocolate mixture cool is so that you don't scramble the eggs.

The recipe indicated that you should pour the mixture into a large tin to bake, and that you then slice it up for your layers. But I am useless at slicing (as evidenced by the frequent mess I make of slicing up bread) and decided that the safer course of action would be to bake the layers separately. I dug around in the tin cupboard and found three the same size and ladled three ladles into each. There was still some mixture left over so I got another tin out (slightly smaller) and poured that in to make a potential 4th layer.

Oven mess

One of the pitfalls of this type of runny cake mixture is that it leaks through the bottom of loose bottomed tins. So I got a bit of chocolatey mess on the worktop (not really a problem) but some also dripped onto the bottom of the oven - I am unlikely to be able to delay the cleaning of the oven for much longer.

The benefit of baking in smaller tins was that it would take less time (I am an impatient cook), the disadvantage was that I had no long how long it would take. So I had to stay close to the oven and this meant that really I had to do some household chores. After about an hour the cakes started to smell cooked and the skewer test confirmed this to be the case. I whisked up a tub of cream but was wise enough not to do any gateau assembly until it had completely cooled. In the meantime I chopped up some veggies to have raw. We needed some healthy food of some sort. 

I had no intention of following the recipe for the filling / stacking, which required me use normal jarred cherries and to thicken the juice with arrowroot. Instead I planned to use a combination of the kirsch, followed by cherry jam (of which, after my first application of kirsch, I discovered we had none - fortunately Matt was still at the shops so I was able to direct him to a suitable product), followed by cream, followed by the cherries themselves. My rationale was that the kirsch would flavour the sponge, the jam would make the cream stick to the sponge and the cherries could then be nestled into the cream. 3 layers looked precarious enough so I didn't risk the 4th. Instead I would fashion this into something for the youngsters we were expecting. 

One layer

3 layers

We all had to wait a while before trying out the completed gateau. I was successful in persuading the youngsters that they wouldn't like it and they seemed to be quite happy with their chocolate hazelnut spread filled sponges. As predicted candles were off but we did all sing 'happy birthday', accompanied by the musical cake slice. Between six grown-ups we devoured half the gateau - some people with considerably larger portions than others. I had a small to moderate sized piece and was overwhelmed by it. So rich, so boozy and so delicious but I wouldn't have managed it it if hadn't have been for the nice pot of tea that we had with it. Being full of fresh cream I wasn't optimistic for the gateau's survival beyond another 24 hours at most. Fortunately our guests were only too keen to take home a party bag.

Half down, half to go

Where to start?