Teaching culture with cake

I love to use food to share my German culture with students. Everyone in the US knows that Germans have two cakes, the black forest cake and the German chocolate cake, right? WRONG!!!! Surprisingly, I had never seen or heard of a German chocolate cake before I moved to the US. Perhaps I should not have been that surprised, because as it turned out the German chocolate cake is an invention from Mr. German and has nothing to do with the people from Germany. The black forest cake is an actual German cake. However, it does contain a good amount of alcohol that most American commercial bakers disregard due to the complicated alcohol regulations in the United States. This cake is best enjoyed when it was home made with an authentic recipe.

Germans have as many cakes as they have people. Every region is famous for its cakes and every housewife has her favorites that she likes to bring to the table for birthdays, holidays or just four o’clock coffee. Yes, Germans like to stop and have a piece of cake and a nice cup of coffee in the afternoon. This explains the popularity of Cafés and bakeries on every corner. My favorite cake of all time is the Donauwelle, literally translated it is the Danubewave cake. It is called this because it is marbled white and chocolate cake, but it is super delicious because it has sour cherries baked into the cake, then gets covered with a layer of buttercream and a chocolate ganache. When you cut the pieces the waves of different colored cake layered with the butter cream and chocolate ganache look like the waves of the Danube river.

If you want to be sure to get a good, tried and true recipe you must go to the best source. In the case of German recipes, ask a German! This German will tell you to just go to www.chefkoch.de, where you can find lots and lots of recipes and pick the one that sounds the best. Ok, you have taken a little German, you can make out the ingredients and figure out the directions but what about measuring the ingredients? Germans use weights while Americans use measures when cooking. So how many cups is 250 grams of sugar vs 250 grams of flour? I have a handy dandy German measuring cup that lists the weights of common ingredients and I can just measure, if you do not have one of these measuring cups, you must have a cooking scale that can be set to metric. Trying to convert different ingredients weights to measures is a nightmare, don’t try it. It takes the fun out of cooking anything. We are half way there. We still have to make a few substitutions for ingredients that cannot be found in the United States. In the case of Donauwelle you can find the ingredients easily, but if you wanted to make Frankfurter grüne Soβe (Frankfurt green sauce), forget it. You must grow at least half of the 7 herbs from very hard to find seeds that compose this sauce. A lot of these substitutions have been discussed and figured out by others on the www.chefkoch.de community forums. The website can help you as long as you are willing to do a little German reading.

I am sure you are reading this and are wondering, “is she ever going to get to the recipe?” I will provide a translated and adapted version of the recipe for Donauwelle below.

Donauwelle adapted from http://www.chefkoch.de/rezepte/563541154614076/Donauwelle-super-easy.html

Ingredients:

For the batter

3 eggs

1-1/4 cups sugar

3/4 cup vegetable oil

3/4 cup milk

2-1/4 cups flour

3 teaspoons baking powder

2 tablespoons of Hershey syrup (this is my substitution because it is what I have in the house)

2 cans of pie cherries in water (drained)

For Buttercream:

6 cups of whipping cream

2 packages of jello instant vanilla pudding 4- ½ cup servings

For Ganache:

1-1/2 cups of chocolate chips

3 tablespoons of coconut oil

Directions for the batter:

Start the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Prepare a small cookie sheet with edges by laying a piece of baking parchment paper in the bottom and spraying the sides with Pam (I usually double it and use a large). Put the cherries into a colander and let them drain while you prepare the batter.

Cream eggs and sugar until they are nice and frothy. Add the oil slowly, then the milk. Mix the flour with the baking powder and add slowly to the batter. Spread HALF of this batter evenly onto the cookie sheet. Add the Hershey syrup to the remaining half of the batter and spread this batter evenly over the batter on the cookie sheet. Add the cherries on top of the batter, slightly pressing them into the batter.

Bake for 25-30 minutes till done. Check with a toothpick if the cake is done. When a toothpick is inserted and comes out clean, the cake is done.

Let the cake cool.

When it is cool whip the whipping cream for a few minutes until you notice it stiffening and add the vanilla pudding. Once this mixture is a nice spreadable consistency, spread it on top of the cake.

The ganache is made by melting the chocolate chips and the coconut oil in a water bath on the stove. As soon as the ingredients have melted, pour them onto the cake and spread them with a clean knife. Let it all cool and set up in the refrigerator for a few hours or overnight.