Baking with Hotglue

I spent Friday night baking with Hotglue. We set ourselves a challenge to try out ten new recipes together this semester. This weekend was her roomate's birthday so it was the perfect time for us to try our hand at a new cake. We based our recipe off a William's Sonoma recipe for a black forest cake but the directions were unclear in some cases and in other's didn't make much sense to us, so we improvised a bit

Hotglue's Black Forest Cake

For the cake:

1/2 cup cake flour
1/2 cup Dutch-process cocoa powder
6 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract
3/4 cup granulated sugar
8 Tbs. (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted and cooled to room temperature


For the sugar syrup:
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup water

For the filling and frosting:
2 1/2 cups heavy cream
2 Tbs. confectioners' sugar
1 tsp. cherry juice
jarred cherries (marschino)
Semisweet chocolate chips

Steps

1. Preheat to 350. Grease your round pan
2. Mix the flour and cocoa in a bowl and set aside.
3. Beat the eggs vanilla and sugar for about 5 minutes or until the volume triples

4. Fold in the flour mixture.
5. (This part made no sense but we did it anyway). Add a dollop of the mixture to your melted butter, stir together and add it all back into the batter.
6. Pour into pan and smooth. Bake for 30-35 minutes. Willaims Sonoma says you want the cake to look puffed.

7. Put the cake on a wire pan to cool. We went and got milkshakes at this point.
8. Once the cake is cool cut into 3 equal layers.

9. To make the syrup, combine the granualted sugar and water and bring to a boil. Stir until the sugar dissolves. Let it cool.
10. Brush each layer with the syrup.
11. To make the frosting, beat the cream and powdered sugar until medium stiff peaks form. Add in the cherry juice, a capful of vanilla and the sugary syrup. Add the syrup and juice in increments unitl you've got it tasting the way you want. We added way more than the recomended tsp.

12. Frost inbetween each layer, adding sliced cherries and chocolate chips as you go.

13. Ice the top layer and the sides. Make sure to put a cherry in the center and surrounded with choc chips and cherries

Side note: Lu and her family keep their sugar, flour, pasta etc in mason jars and I think that is the coolest idea ever