Sachertorte

Vienna's dense chocolate cake split and layered with apricot jam, glazed in dark chocolate and served with unsweetened whipped cream

Origin: Vienna & Austria

From the journey of Apricot.

The Sachertorte is a dense chocolate cake with apricot jam, and the apricot is not a detail but the entire subject of the most famous legal dispute in the history of European baking. The Original Sacher-Torte carries a layer of jam in the middle as well as a thin coat under the glaze; Demel, the imperial confectioner, made a version with jam only beneath the icing and called it the Eduard-Sacher-Torte. The two houses went to court over the naming, and the litigation ran from 1938 until a settlement in 1963, after which the Hotel Sacher kept the words Original Sacher-Torte and Demel was permitted a triangular seal reading Eduard-Sacher-Torte. The cake is attributed to Franz Sacher, who is said to have made it in 1832 as a sixteen-year-old apprentice when the head chef of Prince Metternich's kitchen fell ill and a dessert was required. The attribution is old and consistent and the family has always maintained it; whether the cake as it is now made resembles what a teenager produced under pressure in 1832 is a different question, and the version the hotel sells was substantially developed by his son Eduard at Demel before he founded the Hotel Sacher. The apricots are Austrian and specifically Wachauer Marille, grown along the Danube in the Wachau valley, which holds a European protected designation. They are the same fruit that goes into Marillenknödel, and Austrian apricot jam for this purpose is set firm and sieved smooth so that it spreads in a thin even sheet without lumps. The cake is deliberately dry by modern standards, which is not a fault. It is made to be eaten with a large quantity of unsweetened whipped cream, Schlagobers, and a black coffee, and a moister crumb would defeat the arrangement.

Ingredients

Cake

  • 140 g dark chocolate, 55 per cent, chopped
  • 140 g butter, softened
  • 110 g icing sugar
  • 6 eggs, separated
  • 110 g caster sugar
  • 140 g plain flour, sifted
  • 1 pinch of salt
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract

Filling

  • 300 g apricot jam
  • 2 tbsp rum or water

Glaze

  • 200 g caster sugar
  • 125 ml water
  • 150 g dark chocolate, 55 per cent, chopped

To serve

  • 300 ml double cream, whipped without sugar

Method

  1. Melt the 140g of chocolate and let it cool to lukewarm.
  2. Beat the butter with the icing sugar and vanilla until pale, then beat in the egg yolks one at a time, and fold in the melted chocolate.
  3. Whisk the egg whites to soft peaks, add the caster sugar in three additions, and whisk to a firm, glossy meringue.
  4. Fold a third of the meringue into the chocolate mixture to loosen it, then fold in the rest alternately with the sifted flour and the salt.
  5. Fold, do not stir. The cake has no raising agent beyond the whites, and beating them out gives a flat, heavy torte.
  6. Bake in a lined and buttered 24cm tin at 170°C for fifty-five to sixty-five minutes, until a skewer comes out clean.
  7. Cool for ten minutes, turn out, and leave upside down on a rack until completely cold, which flattens the top.
  8. Warm the apricot jam with the rum, boil it for a minute, and pass it through a sieve so it is perfectly smooth.
  9. Split the cold cake horizontally, spread a generous layer of hot jam on the cut face, sandwich it, and coat the top and sides in a thin even film of the rest.
  10. Let the jam set to a dry glaze before the chocolate goes anywhere near it, or the icing will slide.
  11. For the glaze, boil the sugar and water to 108°C, take it off the heat, add the chocolate, and stir until smooth and thickly pouring.
  12. Pour it over the cake in one movement and spread it with a single sweep of a palette knife. Leave it to set at room temperature, never in the refrigerator, and serve with unsweetened whipped cream.

Notes

The jam layer in the middle is the point of contention and the point of the cake; sieve it and apply it hot. Let the apricot glaze dry before icing. The chocolate glaze is a cooked sugar syrup rather than a ganache, and it wants to be poured at once and spread in a single pass, since working it twice dulls the shine. Set it at room temperature. The crumb is meant to be dry and the whipped cream is not optional. It keeps for a week and is better on the second day.

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