Food Happy: The Best Cake Ever!

This is the recipe to the best cake ever. One day, I was very very bored and I figured I would bake a cake. Not just any cake though, a challenging cake. So I spent 8 hours on the internet trying to find the original, authentic, amazing, best recipe ever, for a schwärzwalder kirsch torte. I could not find a good recipe, so the recipe below is a merge of about eight different recipe's. This cake took twelve hours of my life in total (research and actual baking). Behold it in all it's glory. Plus, the recipe!

(Okay so I'm not the best food photographer in the world but believe me when I say it was totally worth the soul of my first born child.)

Cookie/bottom layer: 

125 grams of flour

10 grams of cocoa

1 teaspoon baking powder

50 grams of sugar

1 packet vanilla sugar (about 1 tablespoon)

75 grams of butter

1 tablespoon (approximately) Kirsch

Mix the flour, cocoa and baking powder in a bowl, then add sugar and butter and knead this until it's all mixed. Spread thinly in the tin that you are going to use for the other layers as well (or you will get size issues) - easiest is to put a sheet of grease paper underneath - in any case, stab it repeatedly with a fork to create lots of holes and put it in a pre-heated oven for 10 to 15 minutes at 200 degrees celcius. 

Remember to check on it very often because it burns really easily. I think the above amounts gave me enough for two cakes, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing because I'm not very good with remembring to check things regularly :P

'Sponge' cake:

4 eggs

100 grams of fine sugar 

100 grams of flour

25 grams of corn starch

10 grams of cacao

1 teaspoon baking powderr

Mix the eggs until they are really light and fluffy (almost a custard-like consistency, this'll take about 8 minutes so be patient!). When the eggs have reached the right consistency, add the sugar one tablespoon at the time, don't add the next one until the previous one is completely absorbed. Sieve the flour, corn starch, cocoa and baking powder together: according to most recipes you have to sieve it approximately four times. I just took their words on it to be honest, I have no idea why but since the recipe turned out amazing, I'm sure there's some magic in sieving it :P Finally, fold in the dry ingredients into the eggs but try to keep this mixture as fluffy as possible. Carefully pour the mix into the baking thin (that you have relieved of its previous cookie layer :P) and bake it for about 20 to 25 minutes at 180 degrees celcius.

The cherries:

About one big jar of cherries (you'll need about 350 grams of cherries and 250ml of their juices, but if you take a big jar (700 grams), that works out perfect.) Drain the cherries but keep the juice because you'll need to boil that down. Easiest way to do this is to mix about 1.5 to 2 tablespoons of corn starch when it's still cold, then boil it until it's become a kind of think syrup-y consistency. Add the cherries to this syrup. You can add the kirsch to this cherry mixture, but it's quite nice to sprinkle it over the sponge instead as well. Or do both if you really like your cake liquor-y :P You can reserve about 10 cherries to decorate the cake with later, or you can use fresh cherries or skip this entirely.

Whipped Cream:

Whip up about 600 to 800 ml cream with 2 packets of vanilla sugar. Apparantly you can add gelatine as well, the whipped cream would keep better then? I don't know, this amounted to failure with me, so I'm not doing that :P

ASSEMBLY!

You'll need all the above ingredients and a bar of very dark chocolate. The assembly is fairly straight forward:

Cut the sponge cake in half, so you now have two layers of cake (ideally speaking anyway).
Start with the cookie layer, spread the cherry mixture on top of this, add a layer of whipped cream, then add the first layer of sponge, sprinkle kirsch on this if you want, then add whipped cream (and cherries if you have any left, though I didn't), then add the second layer of sponge and cover the entire cake in the remaining whipped cream. Shred the dark chocolate over the top and add cherries if you wish. Eat it and enjoy the best cake ever in the universe of things.