It’s a traditional Trinidadian dessert — a chocolate cake soaked in overproof rum and topped with swoops of ultrapasteurized whipped cream.
However wait: It’s additionally a signature Pakistani cake, saturated with cherry brandy essence. And a Chilean cake, festooned with regionally grown cherries. And a Lebanese cake — not too candy, with little to no alcohol. And a Nepali cake. And a Zimbabwean cake. It’s even standard on the distant islands of Fiji.
What sort of dessert may encourage such a territorial dispute?
It’s Black Forest cake, named for a nook of Germany that also conjures photographs of lederhosen and fairy tales.
Attempt telling that to the remainder of the world. The cake, lengthy an adopted favourite in lots of nations, is extra standard than ever — besides maybe in Germany. Thanks partially to a current wave of ’90s-era nostalgia amongst youthful generations, it’s discovered new life on social media and in eating places the world over. Google searches for “Black Forest cake” have almost doubled in quantity over the past 10 years, most of them looking for a recipe.
At this time, Black Forest cake belongs to everybody and nobody. It’s the Danish butter-cookie tin of desserts — a European artifact that has come to transcend cultures. In reality, a number of folks interviewed for this text had been astonished to listen to that the cake didn’t hail from their native nation.
The normal model layers brandy-infused chocolate spongecake with ethereal whipped cream and cherry ornaments. However Natasha Laggan, 40, who runs a Trinidadian cooking account on Instagram and YouTube and lives in Davie, Fla., lengthy believed that the standard liquor for the cake was rum — the spirit utilized in many of the restaurant variations she ate throughout her childhood in California, Trinidad.
Kudakwashe Makoni, 52, a chef from Harare, Zimbabwe, insisted that his nation’s cows lend a distinctly wealthy taste to the cake’s cream. “No one does a Black Forest like Zimbabwe,” he mentioned.
When his household moved to Dallas in 2000, he was shocked to see Black Forest cake at a neighborhood bakery. He questioned: Why was an American store serving a Zimbabwean dessert?
The cake’s very identify proclaims its Teutonic origin. However some folks mentioned they thought “Black Forest” referred to the chocolate shavings on the cake.
Sumayya Usmani, a Glasgow meals author and cookbook creator from Karachi, Pakistan, lengthy thought the Black Forest was a kind of fantasy realm. “It had this Narnia picture in my thoughts, the place there’s stunning snow and cherries and chocolate shavings,” she mentioned.
In Pakistan, the cake is a staple of any revered bakery, mentioned Ms. Usmani, 51. It’s “unique and international, however very a lot a part of the tradition.”
Dessert traits come and go, but Black Forest stays the cartoonish archetype of a celebration cake, with its eye-catching cherry garnish and contrasting black-and-white layers.
“It appears to be like just like the form of cake you’ll draw in the event you had been a toddler and also you had been drawing the proper cake,” mentioned Helen Goh, a cookbook creator in London.
That simplicity, and a taste mixture that may really feel each acquainted and unfamiliar, could assist clarify how a cake from Germany — a rustic that exerts a slender culinary affect globally — captivated such an expansive viewers.
The primary time Kashish Shrestha, 41, a author and photographer, tasted Black Forest cake at a bakery in Kathmandu, Nepal, the feel reminded him of ras malai, a milky, spongy South Asian candy. In Nepal, “Black Forest” is usually used as a generic time period for any form of cake, he mentioned.
Ramin Ganeshram, a Trinidadian American culinary historian in Westport, Conn., mentioned the cake recalled the rum-soaked Caribbean black cake.
As a toddler in Singapore, the cookbook creator Sharon Wee considered Black Forest cake as a fancier model of chiffon muffins, which grew to become standard there within the Fifties. Serving her pals a Black Forest cake on her birthday was a standing image — “like toting your Hermès bag to major college,” mentioned Ms. Wee, 53, who splits her time between New York Metropolis and Singapore.
The identical can’t be mentioned in Germany, the place the cake is seen as “kind of old school,” mentioned Janosch Förster, a analysis comply with on the German Archive of Culinary Arts.
Each its creator and birthplace are nonetheless a matter of debate; some say it got here from the Black Forest area, others say Berlin. However it’s unquestionably a German invention, from someday within the early twentieth century.
“It’s mainly simply a normal, not-so-interesting cake,” mentioned Andreas Klöckner, the chief government of Goldhahn und Sampson, a culinary retailer and cooking college in Berlin. “It has a distinct standing exterior Germany as one thing particular.”
The cake’s travels more than likely occurred as Germans moved all over the world as emigrants, missionaries, cooks in high-end motels and refugees escaping Nazism within the Nineteen Thirties — or Nazis fleeing after World Battle II, mentioned José López Ganem, the manager director of the Tremendous Cacao and Chocolate Institute in Cambridge, Mass.
One of the crucial efficient proselytizers of Black Forest cake was in all probability the British Empire, mentioned Carla Martin, the institute’s president.
“There was a whole lot of German method and German delicacies that obtained unfold via British affiliation,” she mentioned. “They had been the capital middle of the world. They had been taking traditions of the European continent and increasing them, they usually had been the very best at it.”
Black Forest cake had loads going for it. Its elements, notably cocoa powder, had been turning into extra available, mentioned Ms. Ganeshram, the culinary historian. The alcohol preserved the cake, extending its shelf life in tropical climates.
The cake may be simply tailored: Bakers in Muslim-majority nations, for instance, usually omit the liquor, and a few Singaporean recipes name for blueberry jam, which will be cheaper than cherries.
These modifications communicate to the resilience of colonized communities, Ms. Ganeshram mentioned. “This will likely have been introduced right here to a spot it doesn’t essentially belong, however we’re going to take it and adapt it and make it our personal.”
Neither the flavors nor the looks of Black Forest cake align with present pastry traits. Desserts in the present day “are extra refined,” mentioned Dorie Greenspan, the famend cookbook creator. “They’re sparer. They don’t seem to be so over-the-top.”
Nonetheless, a number of pastry cooks are giving the nostalgic cake a inventive replace.
It arrives as a roulade at Thistle & Leek, a neighborhood restaurant in Newton, Mass., and in a jar at Swadesi, a brand new Indian-inspired bakery in Chicago. (Swadesi’s proprietor, Sujan Sarkar, as soon as believed that Black Forest cake got here from Kolkata, India, the place as a toddler he noticed most of the metropolis’s Christians making ready muffins through the holidays.)
At his Kayu Bakehouse areas in London, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, the Lebanese chef Karim Bourgi adorns his model with whipped vanilla ganache and darkish chocolate crémeux. Heena Punwani, the proprietor of Maska Bakery in Mumbai, fields weekly messages asking when her Black Forest cake with chocolate mousse and Kashmiri cherry compote will make its return.
Christopher Tan, the creator of the Singaporean dessert cookbook “The Means of Kueh,” described Black Forest cake as “indestructible,” as a result of it may be a dressed-up confection or a easy grocery retailer deal with.
“In case you can solely get canned cherries and barely doubtful U.H.T. whipped cream, in the event you can solely get compound chocolate, you may nonetheless make one thing that appears like a Black Forest,” he mentioned.
Mr. Tan grew up in a household that purchased the cake from pastry outlets at luxurious motels in Singapore, however a decade in the past, he had the prospect to attempt it straight from the supply. On a working journey to Germany, he visited Ulm, a metropolis close to the Black Forest, going from bakery to bakery in the hunt for the cake. However nobody served it — the house owners all mentioned it was passé.
