Christmas Dinner – Behind the scenes I: Dessert

It’s a little late to talk about Christmas dinner. I know. But better late than never, right?

We had a few friends over for dinner on Christmas Eve. The festivity in the holiday season air somehow makes us feel confident to pull off a 4-course menu – red pepper cream soup, seared foie gras with cranberry chutney, smoked salmon (courtesy of Arnaud); main course is roast rib eye with blanched green beans and sautéed baby potatoes. Must not forget about dessert – black forest cake.

My experience told me the more I could make ahead the better, especially the dessert. Because I’ll always run out of time no matter how early I start on the party day! So I had planned to work on the cake the night before. But at about 9PM and with all the ingredients ready, I realized I didn’t have an appropriate cake pan (way to go, chef!). so I rushed to the mall – the only place with a cake pan for sale that’s still open. After getting a 9” cake pan at Williams-Sonoma I decided to spend a little time in the mall. And you can guess the rest: at the end of the night I got home with some new clothes and no dessert was made.

So there goes my plan of sleeping in next day. I got up early to make the chocolate cake for black forest. The cake baked just in time so I could go do an airport drop-off while letting it cool.

When I got back I started to work on other parts of the cake – cherry pie filing, chocolate ganache, whipped cream, and rum syrup, among other things (yes, dessert wasn’t the only thing we served) The decorating looks easy enough on YouTube, but what I failed to factor in was every step adds up. It was almost 4PM when I was finally ready to assemble the cake.

As I got ready to halve the cake to put fillings in, I realized, the chocolate cake was too short. It’ll look more like a black forest pie! I was going to give it a go. So it’s short, so what? It tastes the same! But hubby said neh, black forest gotta look like black forest. So with less than 2 hours to show time, I started again to mix cocoa powder, flour, baking powder and baking soda, whipped together eggs, milk, oil, and vanilla extract, combined the dry and wet ingredients, poured the batter in the cake pan, and sent it to the oven.

And again, that goes my plan of presenting a finished black forest elegantly. Guests walked in as I plastered layers of chocolate ganache on it, with YouTube video in front of me. Lol!

Here are some pictures:

plastering layers of ganache on the cake

chocolate cake as the base of black forest

final product!

here are the links where i got the recipes from – enjoy!

chocolate cake

black forest cake decoration

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