Sachertorte Recipe

Description

A delicious fine moist very chocolaty cake that is one of the famous historic foods from Wien (Vienna), the capital of Austria.

Summary

Whisk up an egg white & sugar foam.
Whisk up butter & sugar foam.
Mix the foams together with flour, yolks & lots of chocolate.
Bake
Fill with apricot jam.
Coat with a chocolate & sugar syrup glaze.
Takes approximately: 30 min work, 80 min cooking, 180 min total.

Ingredients

Cake Body	Chicken Eggs	6
	Caster Sugar	200 g
	Dark Eating Chocolate	125 g
	Plain Flour	125 g
	Butter	100 g
	Vanilla flavouring
	Baking paper
Filling	Apricot Jam	150 g
Glaze	Golden Syrup	150 g
Glaze	Dark Eating Chocolate	150 g

Note that chocolate appears twice in the list (in both the cake & the glaze) making 275 g in total.

Equipment

Oven. 2 mixing bowls. Electric whisk (or hand one if you have lots of time). Knife. Scales (or just estimate). Microwave oven with microwaveable bowl (or a hob & saucepan but that is more hassle). Round cake tin (preferably with push-out bottom) about 20 cm diameter & 10 cm high. A cup (or similar as temporary egg yolk container). Baking paper (or reusable equivalent).

Detailed Instructions

Split each of the 6 eggs putting the whites in a mixing bowl. (This is the stage that requires most care. Split each egg three ways: into yolk, white & shell. Discard the shells of course. Err on the side of purity of the egg whites as even a minute amount of fatty egg yolk in the whites mixture can seriously reduce their ability to foam when whisked but a little white in the yolk mixture causes no problem.)
The cake body:
1. The egg white foam:
  1. Put the egg whites in a mixing bowl.
  2. Whisk until fairly stiff & foamy. (Do not get any fat in this mix from the yolks, butter or chocolate because it will go flat.)
  3. Add three quarters (150 g) of the sugar.
  4. Whisk until fully stiff & foamy. (It is the air in this which inflates the cake so make sure there are as many little bubbles in there as possible.)
1. The butter foam:
  1. Give the 100 g of butter a short blast in the microwave to get up to soft, but not molten state (not vital but it saves time whisking & deters the whisk firing out lumps of butter across the kitchen).
  2. Put the remaining 50 g of sugar in a mixing bowl.
  3. Add the 100 g of butter.
  4. Add some vanilla flavouring.
  5. Put the first load (125 g) of chocolate in the microwave bowl & melt the chocolate in the microwave.
  6. Meanwhile, return to the butter/sugar mix & whisk until it goes pale & creamy looking.
  7. Add the egg yolks.
  8. Add the molten chocolate.
  9. Gently (not whisking because whisking something this sloppy would knock the bubble back out) mix the ingredients in the bowl.
2. Add the 125 g of plain flour to the butter/yolk/sugar mixture via a sieve (because lumps of white flour show up badly in this brown cake).
3. Add the whites foam to the butter/yolk/sugar/flour mixture (not the other way around or you will have two horribly greasy bowls to wash up instead of one).
4. Mix very gently folding the ingredients together (actually it does not matter if the mixing is imperfect because the resulting marbled effect is quite attractive, although definitely not traditional, but ensure the heavy chocolate does not all end up at the bottom of the bowl because it end up in the middle of the cake making that bit too dense to cook fully before the top burns).
5. Line the cake tin with greaseproof paper.
6. Fill cake tin with the mix.
7. Bake at 170°C (Gas Mark 3.5) for about 70 min.
8. Allow to cool in the tin (so it does not slop) upsidedown (so that the more noticeable top of the cake ends up flat at the expense of the bottom) until at room temperature (about 30 min).
The filling:
1. Microwave the 150 g of apricot jam until it melts.
2. Cut the cake body in half horizontally & place the halves with inner (cut) faces uppermost.
3. Pour the molten jam onto both halves of the cake.
4. Allow it to soak in.
5. Reassemble the cake.
6. Allow the surface to cool again.
The glaze:
1. Microwave the 150 g of golden syrup (NB: 150 g of syrup is about 100 ml and therefore about 5 heaped dessertspoonfuls.) & the remaining 150 g of chocolate together until the syrup just starts to bubble (it does not need not be quite this hot but the first bubble is a convenient temperature indicator). Do not let the mixture seriously boil as that cooks the chocolate causing the glaze to go grainy.
2. Stir it until they are smoothly mixed.
3. Allow it to cool to about 25°C.
4. It should now be spreadable and able to support a thickness of about 2 mm on a vertical surface (test on the wall of the bowl) yet return to shiny soon after being spread. If it is too hard or soft, add more golden syrup or chocolate and go back to the microwaving stage. (The exact amount of syrup needed depends on the sugariness of the chocolate. About equal weight of syrup & chocolate for normal UK plain eating chocolate (which is 50% cocoa solids) but more syrup if using darker (e.g. 70%) chocolate.)
5. Spread cake body with the glaze.
6. Leave it to set.

Freezing

The cake is quite long lasting, especially before its protective glaze is breached, and can easily remain at (normal UK) room temperature for a week before use. However it also freezes well:

Frozen, it will keep fine for months with the only noticeable damage being sometimes a loss of sheen to the glaze.
To freeze it, simply put it still on its plate in a freezer without the cake touching anything else. Once solid the frozen cake (plus plate) is robust and can simply be wrapped in a carrier bag and returned to the freezer casually stacked with other frozen goods. To defrost it, take it out the freezer, remove the bag, cover it with an upturned bowl(not touching the cake) or similar to keep dirt off and leave it at room temperature for several hours. Microwaving on full power does not work as well because the glaze melts and runs off before the cake body defrosts.
To transport it I usually just put a bowl over the cake and put the plate, cake & bowl in carrier bag. Tying the top of the bag holds the bowl protectively over cake and the remaining handle tops provide a carrying point that reduces tipping of the cake - I have even cycled to parties with a cake hanging from my bike's handlebars like that with never having damaged the cakes in the process. If travelling for a longer time then simply pack it up like that still frozen as the frozen state will give it more protection initially and it can defrost ready for use in transit.
If you know whilst you are making the cake you are going to be freezing it then freezing it before glazing it makes it easier to glaze, it being harder. It also means you can postpone glazing if you run out of chocolate!

Miscellaneous

'Sachertorte' is not pronounced (English phonetic) "s-a-sh-er-t-or-t" but more like "z-a-kh-u-t-or-r-t-uh" where 'kh' is similar to the 'ch' in 'loch' in English & 'uh' is the neutral vowel.
To get the traditional perfectly cylindrical shape, trim the cake body into a circle with vertical edges & cut the top off flat before glazing. This wastes cake though so, if you are making the cake for its taste not its appearance, don't bother. Getting the surface smooth from hollows saves on glaze though.
Don't use white chocolate in the cake body because it is fairly unnoticeable by flavour & colour and leaving only the moistening effect.
The 'dark eating chocolate' referred to is dark by UK standards where the archetypical dark chocolate is (what is now called) Cadbury's Bournville Classic only about 38% chocolate solids. In countries (possibly soon including the UK where Bournville has recently been raised to 60%) where dark chocolate means 70% or more, this recipe might need adjustment.
The chicken eggs are UK size 'medium' which is about 60 g (officially 53-63 g). If using eggs of a significantly different size, adjust the number of eggs accordingly.
Don't use self-raising flour. It creates large bubbles in the cake.
Although the cake body is essentially a Savoy sponge with lots of added chocolate, don't describe it as such before someone tries it because they might expect sponges to be light and fluffy and mistakenly think this has been cooked wrong because, with of all that chocolate & jam, it is rich, dense & moist instead.
If carried out in the order above, no tool should need to be washed up more than once.
It is not very sticky so cheaper greaseproof paper (which is intended for wrapping rather than as non-stick but often is reasonably non-stick too) might be usable instead of baking paper. Alternatively the same baking paper can be reused several times (saving repeated cutting to shape as well as cost) if sponged down whilst washing up and left to dry.
If taking to a party, do not use a plate to which you are sentimentally attached, is expensive to replace or is needed to make up a set. Often people want to hang on to the leftovers to eat later and the glaze typically sticks them to the plate so they borrow the plate too and frequently forget to return it.
There are several other versions of Sachertorte. The one from the Larousse Gastronomique food encyclopaedia uses even more eggs in the cake and egg & cream in the glaze.

Nutrition

Energy	23 MJ = 5500 kcal
Fat	220 g
Carbohydrate	total	900 g
	sugars	800 g
Protein	75 g

(This is an approximation from adding up approximate values for the ingredients.)

Origin

Sachertorte was originally invented by Franz Sacher at the 1814-5 Congress of Vienna.

This is a simplified version of a version of a recipe based on one from the 'Sacher-Kochbuch' which I got from a friend of a friend. My main simplifications have been whipping the whites mixture before the yolks mixture to avoid getting fat in the egg white foam without having to wash up the whisk twice and replacing a difficult boiled sugar-water solution (slightly too little water causes the glaze to rapidly set and apply lumpily whereas slightly too much water causes the glaze to take a day to set and runs off cake) with twrivially easy golden syrup. Three years after publishing this, I accidentally put most of the sugar in the first bowl, instead of dividing it equally as intended, and found that both increased the egg white foaminess and reduced the butter whisking time so I incorporated that uneven sugar allocation in the recipe. Seven years after publishing this, I accidentally put the flour in before the whites foam instead of the other way around and it worked better (less mixing needed so loss of air from the foam) so I adapted the recipe to that order.