I made this cake to take to our neighbor Chris’s house for a dinner party tonight. I made the cake in two stages – yesterday I made the chocolate genoise layers (almost 100% whole grain – just a tiny bit of AP flour and mostly whole wheat pastry flour), then today I made the syrup and stabilized whipped cream and assembled the cake. It has a layer of cherry pie filling in the middle of the layers of chocolate, and the genoise is soaked in a Kirsch sugar syrup. It wasn’t really hard to make. The whipped cream is stabilized using plain gelatin, which kind of grossed me out, but it tasted fine. It seemed a little weepy to me, actually – although the rosettes piped out easily.
I don’t think any of us were crazy about the cake. It was good, nothing particularly wrong with it… it just wasn’t a “wow” dessert.

• Black Forest Cake (King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking, p. 398)