Black Forest Cake

On Eid Adha, my husband's pengajian held a family gathering. I was assigned to bring cake (as usual; I got a nickname "bakery" from my pengajian). And some of the wives requested something chocolatey like a blackforest cake or a mud cake. There's actually a mud cake that I've been really wanting to try from The Great Australian Bake-off book, but since a mud cake look too plain, I went for a blackforest cake instead (even tho I'm not that fond of blackforest). 

I used a recipe from Allrecipes.com. I got soooo many compliments with the cake. My friends said the cake is not too sweet or too milky-tasting. And when I shared the recipe, another friend of mine said, "it looks really easy to make". Indeed! You don't need to cream butter and sugar, which is a lot of time saving.

INGREDIENTS:

Cake:

• 2 1/8 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 cups white sugar
• 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 baking soda
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup milk
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1 tbsp vanilla essence/extract

Cherry filling:

• 2 (450 gr) cans pitted cherries
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1/4 cup cornstarch
• 1 tsp vanilla essence/extract

Frosting:

• 3 cups whipping cream
• 1/3 cup confectioner's sugar

DIRECTIONS:

1. Preheat oven to 175 degrees C. Grease and flour two 9 inch round cake pans (I used square pans).
2. Combine flour, sugar, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add eggs, milk, oil, and vanilla essence/extract and beat until well blended. Pour the batter into prepared pans.
3. Bake for 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean. Cool cake in pans on wire racks for 10 minutes.
4. Drain cherries, reserve 3/4 cup juice. Combine 1/4 cup of the reserve juice, cherries, and sugar in a saucepan. Combine the other 1/4 cup of reserved juice and mix with cornstarch. Heat the saucepan and stir just until the sugar dissolves. Then add the cornstarch mix and cook until it thickens (use high heat if you don't want most of your cherries to break apart). Turn off the heat, then add vanilla essence/extract.
5. Combine whipping cream and confectioner's sugar in a chilled bowl. Beat with mixer at high speed until stiff peaks form.
6. Assembling: Split the cakes into halves. Crumb one of the halved layer for decorating the sides (I didn't do this, I just saved the layer to make a mini blackforest, as pictured in this post). Brush the layers with the last 1/4 cup of reserved cherries juice to moisten the cake. Spread 1 cup frosting on a layer and top with cherry topping. Repeat process for the second layer. Top with third cake layer and frost sides and top of the cake. Shave some dark cooking chocolate, sprinkle it around and on top of the cake and decorate the cake with the remaining frosting.

Source (with small changes in directions).