Black Forest Cake (Portal cake)

I’m getting more and more into combining tasty recipes with geeky stuff. That’s why I am sharing this recipe for Black Forest Cake from the Portal games with you today. Black Forest Cake is a chocolate whipped cream cake with a cherry filling, originating from Austria.

In Portal you are required to do numerous tasks in a research facility guided by a computer named GlaDOS, who repeatedly mentions that following the experiment, there will be cake. As the game progresses, the player finds messages written on the walls as warnings. One message scrawled on the walls in later levels reads “the cake is a lie. the cake is a lie. the cake is a lie. the cake is a lie”. This cake is a virtualized cartoon version of a Black Forest cake that was sold near Valve Headquarters.

For this recipe I was looking through my bookcase of cook books for an old recipe and I found my father’s old little black cook book full of notes. I adjusted the recipe for you and it’s surprisingly easy to make. You cannot call it Black Forest Cake if it doesn’t contain cherry liqueur! You can buy this at your local liquor store.

And I promise you, the cake is not a lie 🙂

Ingredients

Springform pan, 26 cm

Cake

10 eggs
360 gr sugar
3 tsp vanilla sugar
pinch of salt
100 gr cornstarch
300 gr flour
4 full tablespoons of cocoa powder
2 tsp bakingpowder
2 caps almond extract

Filling

350 gr pitted cherries
200 ml cherryjuice or water
50 gr sugar
300 ml heavy cream
1 cap lemon extract
1 tbsp cornstarch

Garnish

300 ml heavy cream
3 tbsp sugar
1 tsp vanilla sugar
2 tsp dry milkpowder for stabilizing the whipped cream
dark chocolate shavings
1 tbsp kirsch (cherry liqueur)
8 candied cherries

Preheat the oven to 160ºC. Split the eggs and whisk the yolks with the sugar until creamy. Whisk in a clean, grease free bowl the eggwhites and the salt into stiff peaks. Mix flour, cocoa and cornstarch. Stir flour and eggwhites into the yolks and pour it into the greased springform pan. Bake for 45 minutes in the middle of the oven and check with a scewer. Let it cool completely on a wire rack.

Cut the cake into 3 layers. The easiest way to do this is to place your hand flat on the side of the cake and press a toothpick between every finger. Repeat this around the cake, so you can cut the even layers above every scewer. This trick also works if you use a ruler. Before cutting the cake you need to make an incision, so you can place the layers correctly and you cake will never be crooked!

Drain the cherries and keep 200ml of the fluids. Bring the fluids and cherries to a boil and make a paste out of the corstarch and water. Pour this into the boiling liquid and let it boil softly until it thickens. Add a cap of lemon extract to taste and let it cool. Whip the cream and and add the cherries. Divide half of the cherry whipped cream mix on the bottom, place the second layer on top and divide the remaining cherry mix. Add the top layer.

Whip the cream with the dry milkpowder, liqueur and sugar, then put two tablespoons of whipped cream in a piping bag. Divide the remaining whipped cream on your cake and stick the chocolate shavings on until it’s completely covered. Pipe 8 rosettes on the cake and put a candied cherry on each rosette. Place a candle in the middle, as shown in the ingame image. Unfortunately I didn’t have a candle.