I’m not going to smear the whole thing with cream, however: one of the joys of a layer cake is seeing them laid tantalisingly out before you, so it is a shame to hide them under a blanket of snow. Given the tartness of the cherries and the slight bitterness of the sponge, I think this is one place we can get away with doing it chantilly-style, with icing sugar and vanilla extract. Whipped cream, in quantity, is sadly a defining feature of the BFG. Be generous with the cherries too: Pizey is so mean with them, recommending less than 100g for a 23cm cake, that I wonder if it is a typo, particularly as I also ran out of whipped cream two layers in. I do like her morello cherry jam, though, which brings a more well-rounded cherry flavour to every mouthful essential when the preserved sort often lack punch.
I try the ordinary tinned sort in a recipe that doesn’t specify a variety, and find them too sweet – your best bet is to go to Lidl or Aldi, which stock such everyday German essentials, though I also happen upon them frozen in my local Londis (which boasts a fairly esoteric stock), and they can occasionally be spotted pickled in booze at this time of year.īell soaks dried versions, which are more widely available, in brandy, but I find them too stridently tart the chocolate struggles to compete. Morello, or sour, cherries are sadly difficult to get hold of in this country, particularly in the depths of winter. I’m not sure Amend’s cinnamon brings anything extra to the party, though. I’m also going to use soft light brown sugar instead of caster, for a deeper, more interesting kind of sweetness. I’m not inclined to go for a third, given my growing conviction that the lighter sponges are the way forward here in any case.ĭelia’s flourless sponge, which uses cocoa powder as the sole dry ingredient, gets the biggest thumbs up of the evening, though I’m going to tweak the ratios slightly in order to give it a more intense chocolate flavour. The taste is nice enough, but the texture is tough and heavy. The Prawn Cocktail Years version, though I attempt it twice, defies me: though I sense it is supposed to be dense and moist, mine ends up more like a chocolate pancake studded with large pockets of air. In any other context, I’d find Bell’s cake the most attractive: soft and fluffy, with a rich flavour, it is a classic chocolate sponge.
#Slice black forest gateau plus
The Prawn Cocktail Years duo, Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham, and Annie Bell’s Baking Bible plump for much richer affairs, with the former going for melted chocolate as well as the more usual cocoa, plus butter, and Bell adding fromage frais as well. Delia Smith, Roger Pizey (described by Marco Pierre White as “one of the finest pastry chefs Britain has ever known” on the cover of his book, World’s Best Cakes) and Rita Amend, German blogger and native of the Rhine-Main, go down this road.
The most contentious aspect of the whole affair most of the recipes I find use a light, fatless sponge, which makes sense given the amount of cream it is generally considered necessary to ladle on top.
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