Start by soaking some 250 g of pitted cherries in brandy or liquor.
For the sponge cake you'll need
2 eggsBeat the eggs with sugar and vanilla until white and fluffy. Heat up the milk or water with butter until nearly boiling. Slowly pour in the hot liquid with the egg fluff stirring carefully. Mix the flour with baking powder and sieve in, still being careful. Adding the liquid in hot prevents the mix from going flat, so this bit usually does not fuck up very easily. For testing your motivation for baking you can, instead of stirring carefully, whip strongly while adding the other ingredients to the egg fluff to see how quickly it goes flat. Pour mix into a cake form and bake in 175 degrees C for 35 to 40 minutes. This turns into a chocolate base by reducing 3/4 dl of the wheat flour and replacing it with dark cocoa powder. You can also add some dark chocolate in with the milk or water while heating it. I am telling about these chocolate options only now in case someone started baking without reading the instructions through first.
2 dl sugar
50 g butter
1 dl milk or water
3 dl wheat flour
1,5 tsp baking powder
2 tsp vanilla sugar
For a chocolate icing you'll need 100 g of dark chocolate and 0,25 dl of light cream. Melt the chocolate carefully and add the cream into it. Chocolate can quite easily be burned in a microwave oven, but getting it too hot is easy also on a hotplate. You know your chocolate has gotten too hot when it starts turning dry and grainy, and no matter how much cream you add into it never dissolves to nice and runny again, and thus cannot be used for anything useful ever again. If there's more chocolate available, you can try it again but this time put the chocolate into a steel bowl and on top of a pot with steaming water in it. This should be a more gentle way of melting chocolate.
If your chocolate icing has worked all right, it will be easier to spread it on the cake if the cake is still warm. By putting the chocolate on the cake while it's still hot you may succeed in getting it running all the way down the sides leaving only an ugly thin layer of dark colour on top of the cake. I this example case, the chocolate got too warm (twice) so I kept adding more heavy cream to it and the cake had already cooled down. The icing remains soft and messy.
After this painful phase you're ready to start making the vanilla creme filling to accompany the cherries. Take 2 egg yolks, 0.4 dl sugar, 1 dl of starch flour (potato flour of corn flour) and 1,5 dl milk and stir them together in a small pot. Put the pot on a low heat and keep stirring until it thickens. Now, depending on the kind of starch you're using, you can go wrong in different ways. Of course a way of fucking up the creme regardless of the starch is to get impatient while the mix is heating up and walk away from it for a while or to turn up the heat. This guarantees the mix will start cooking unevenly and you'll get a lot of lovely lumps in your smooth creme. But back to the starch: potato starch should only be cooked until it just boils. If you keep boiling it and stir it thoroughly, you'll get a stringy, chewy consistency to your creme. With corn starch, on the other hand, you're supposed to cook it for 3 or so minutes after it starts boiling. If you don't cook it for long enough, the starch will leave an annoying, floury taste to the creme. After the creme has thickened, add a teaspoonful of vanilla sugar and some 20 g of butter in pieces into the hot creme and stir until the butter has mixed in. Keep also adding more milk to it thinking there must be an error in the recipe and that it's too thick for any sensible purpose. How this will help you to fuck up, you'll learn as you mix the creme into whipped cream.
To be able to mix the whipped cream into the creme, the creme must be cooled down. If left uncovered, a crust will form on the surface of the creme and when stirred it maker the creme lumpy. Take a piece of plastic wrap and cover the pot with it. This will not stop the crust from forming, but at least you have put some thought and effort in trying to prevent it. Another way of almost getting it right is to put the plastic wrap on the surface of the creme (which will actually prevent the crust) but have such a large pot that the creme is sitting on the bottom as a thin layer. Then, after having cooled the creme, when you pull the wrap off, it'll take most of your creme with it. Stir in whipped cream according to taste. If you earlier thought you're smarter than the recipe and kept adding milk to the creme you will now find that your filling is too runny.
Next step is to cut the cake into two halves for filling it. Make sure you cut the top part much thicker than the bottom. This way the cake will seem too dry no matter what, as your icing is soft and sticky and you can't turn it upside down for moisturizing it, and you can't get any liquid into the cake through the icing, either. By adding too much milk or liquor to moisten the bottom, you'll make it really hard to get off pieces of the cake neatly.
Then just spread the cherries on the cake bottom, spread an amount of the vanilla creme on top, add the top cake layer and cover the edges of the cake with whipped cream. Add decorations. I was going to make decorative leaves out of white chocolate, but got so sick with all the other struggle I decided not to even try. Fucking up decorative chocolate leaves shall thus be demonstrated later.
And what happened to the cake? It got eaten. As I said, it was for a special friend.
