I tried to make a Sachertorte again!

I've made one in the past, and it came out great even though the recipe was complicated and took ages (~4 hours), so I thought I would try to make it again !

Important to note is that Sachertorte is an Austrian chocolate cake, it's rich in flavour and uses apricot jam and dark chocolate.
In my variation, I followed the BBC Good Food website's recipe, I didn't have dark chocolate so replaced that with milk chocolate, and used an apple & apricot puree.
Because it was a puree, I skipped the step that describes heating the jam, as it was basically already a liquid. Also, I want to highlight, I thought substituting the dark chocolate with milk chocolate wouldn't have any negative effect, but I was wrong! I'll describe this later in the post.

The ingredients for the cake

• 200 grams dark chocolate (I used milk chocolate)
• 8 eggs
• 275 grams caster sugar
• 175 grams butter
• 200 grams plain flour

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The ingredients for the filling and chocolate glaze

• 250g apricot jam (I used apple and apricot puree)
• 50g caster sugar
• 170 millilitres double cream
• 200 grams dark chocolate
• 25 grams butter

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The steps

To start, I prepped the melted chocolate, separated the egg whites and yolks. Then, I whisked the egg whites with a pinch of salt. I had an electric whisk that my friend lent me which is essential for this recipe!! I whisked this until it formed 'soft peaks'. I reallyyy struggled on this step, and then I had to gradually add only 200 grams of sugar, until it got to the 'stiff peak' stage. The issue is here it took agessss, definitely because of the amount of mixture, but my arm got so tired!

stiff peaks

I had to google pictures of what the stiff peak and soft peak stages should look like, honestly, don't know if I did actually get the stages right but it seemed to have worked?

I made sure to pre-heat my oven, I used an airfryer oven which made it a bit tricky to sort out the temperature and time to cook, I'll mention the heat I used later at that stage.

Next, I beat the butter and the last bit of the sugar together until it was creamy, adding in the egg yolks slowly.

mixture of beaten eggs and sugar

Eventually, I needed to add the previously melted chocolate, but! It had cooled down since and was starting to harden. So, I put the bowl which had the chocolate in another bowl filled with hot water so that it melted the contents.

When the chocolate was liquidy again, I added about a third (1/3) of the whisked egg whites into the batter.

adding in the egg whites

After combining this, I sifted the flour gradually into the mixture, folding it in every so often. Then, I folded in the remaining egg whites.

batter

The batter was now done! I slowly poured it into my prepared cake tin, but it was too shallow for all of the mixture. I decided to do as much as I could into this cake tin, and that would be the cake for my sachertorte.

sachertorte batter

With the remaining batter, I poured it into a separate tin, and cut some slices of pears to decorate the top.

the extra cake

This extra cake I just cooked the next day, it was a lot thinner but still delicious.

So for the sachertorte cake, this is what it looked like after 25 minutes in the airfryer at 170 degrees celsius. The original recipe said to put it in for an hour, at about 150 degrees celsius for a fan oven. I'm glad I kept an eye on mine as it was so much quicker!!

cooked batter

I left the cake to cool for about 15 minutes, I cut the cake in half, then cut each halved the base horizontally.

basically got 2 sachertortes

After this, I spread the puree inbetween the sandwiched layers, and on the tops of each cake.

Next, it was time to make the chocolate glaze. This is where a lot of things went wrong.

In a saucepan, I boiled some sugar and water together, and then when that cooled, added in some of the double cream. I emptied this into a cup as I didn't want so much washing.
I reused the saucepan to heat together the cream, butter and chocolate, and finally added the sugar syrup I had just made.
This came out really watery, and I didn't wait for the mixture to cool before pouring it...

disaster

As you can see, it didn't stick on the cake, and was not visually appealing at all!

trying to glaze

I even put the glaze into the fridge, and the cakes too, to see if that would help. After a few minutes, I transferred the cakes to clean plates as the mess was really too much !

I decided to call it a day, it was still delicious of course, but I think I know what went wrong with the glaze.
The original recipe uses dark chocolate, but I used milk chocolate, so I think that was a factor. Then, I didn't wait for it to cool at all before pouring!

Anyways..

Here's the final product!

final result

Hope you like it!