Black Forest cake (Indian Style)

Black Forest cake (Indian Style)

So I am not very good at making cakes. I always turn to dabba cake (cake mix in a box) for my cakes. Those for me, come out nice, soft and moist. My cakes from scratch usually come out a little dry, so the cake mix in the box is a saviour for me. There are a few times when I made cakes from scratch and they have come out just OK. I rather bake something savoury than a cake! I do like baking.

Y'day for my bro's birthday I dared to try it out again, but this time for the first time a choclate cake which I have never made before. That too the Indian style Black forest cake. So my mission started with searching for a perfect cake recipe. I found many which are almost similar. In the end I followed 'this recipe'. I made some changes to it, so I tweeked it a little. And in the end, it came out good, maybe not perfect, but maybe better than ever before. It was soft and moist, and tasted good too :).

I would suggest doing all the prep work prior to baking. I had intended to use Reddiwhip for decorating the cake before adding the chocolate shavings, but my can stopped working, so I ended up just adding the chocolate shavings.
For the unsweetened cocoa, I used Hershey's brand. And for chocolate shavings, I used the Cadbury's milk chocolate bar.

Ingredients for cake:

Dry:

1 and 2/3 cups all purpose flour
1 and 1/2 cups sugar
1 and 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 and 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

Wet:

2 eggs
1 and 1/2 cups milk
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 stick butter (sweet cream, unsweetened)(melted in microwave)
3 tbsp hot water

This is the cake turned upside down...you don't want to see the bottom, trust me...:)

Filling and decorating:

1 10oz bottle cherries( half of them chopped small for filling, half of them chopped into halves for decorating)
1 8oz can crushed pine apple
Chocolate shavings (I used 2 big Cadbury milk chocolate bars, shredded in a food processor, You can grate them by hand if you don't have a food processor)

Whipped cream frosting:

473ml or 1 pint heavy whipping cream (found near the milk section in grocery store)(whipped to stiff peaks, takes about 10-15 min with a hand mixer)(if whipped before, store it in the refrigerator so that it doesn't melt)
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
5 tbsp confectioners sugar or powdered sugar

Sugar syrup for pouring on the cake:

1/2 cup water
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract

Method:

Butter the baking pan, dust it with dry flour and keep aside.
Sift the dry ingredients together in a small bowl. In a larger bowl, mix all the wet ingredients together and blend them with a hand blender. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and blend them into a smooth batter. You can use 2 9in pans or one tall 8 or 9in pan for baking. I used a tall or not so tall 8in pan and was scared that it would fall over while baking. Thankfully it didn't. just came all the way up and over and stopped there :). Thank God for that!!!

I forgot to take a picture before putting the top on..sorry...

Assembly:

If using 2 separate cakes, make sure you cut the surfaces to flat. I cut through my one cake to make it into 2 halves.I spooned half of the sugar syrup on the bottom half of the cake. I covered this surface with whipped cream and added some chopped cherries, crushed pineapple and covered it with the other half.
I spooned the rest of the sugar syrup over the top before covering the whole cake with rest of the whipped cream. I decorated it with the cherry halves and chocolate shavings.

Well it turned out good in the end so I am happy with this venture! Enjoy!!!

This is going to Nina from Confessions of a Bake-a-holic's 'Bake-a-Cake' event.