Vegan Black Forest Cake

Ingredient Notes

Authentic German Black Forest gateau uses Kirschwasser. Kirsch is a clear, cherry-flavored liquor. You can also use sweeter cherry brandy, regular brandy, or Amaretto here. For a kid-friendly version, try extra cherry juice or apple juice.

Non-dairy milk is mixed with apple cider vinegar which creates a vegan buttermilk substitute. From my experience, soy milk works best for creating buttermilk, but you can absolutely use another plant-based milk such as almond milk or oat milk depending on your dietary preferences.

Sunflower oil keeps the chocolate cake moist, you can also use light olive oil, vegetable oil, or rapeseed oil.

Dutch-processed cocoa powder gives the chocolate cake a deep intense flavor. You can also use unsweetened dark chocolate cocoa powder. Natural cocoa powder is more acidic and will yield a different result in the cake, both in taste and texture.

I use frozen sour cherries for this recipe as I love the bright red color they give. You can also use dark sweet cherries or fresh cherries.

As the recipe calls for unsweetened cherry juice, I usually defrost the cherries over a sieve for a couple of hours and use the drained juice that they naturally leak out. This saves buying extra cherry juice, and you can always top up the juice with a little water if the amount doesn't quite add up.

Bake The Cakes

This step can be done a day in advance. In fact, I recommend making it a day ahead to allow the cakes time to chill. If you're stuck on time, still allow 2 hours for chilling as this makes the chocolate cake layers so much easier to work with.

First, add all the dry ingredients to a large mixing bowl and stir to combine. In this case, that's plain flour, brown sugar, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, and sea salt.

Then add all of the wet ingredients to the same large bowl, that's the vegan buttermilk, vanilla extract, sunflower oil, and hot coffee, and gently whisk until the mixture is just combined.

Pour the vegan chocolate cake batter into either 2 x 8-inch cake tins that have been lined with parchment paper.

Bake in a preheated oven for 30-35 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Make The Cherry Filling

To a small saucepan, add a third of the cherry juice along with the sugar and cornstarch. Whisk the mixture really well to form a paste (otherwise known as cornstarch slurry). This will help to prevent lumps in the cherry sauce.

Add in the remaining cherry juice and cook over medium heat for 5 minutes until the mixture thickens. Make sure you continuously whisk the mixture to prevent it from burning to the bottom of the pan.

Once thickened, remove the cherry sauce from the heat and stir in the Kirschwasser.

Lastly, stir in the cherries and allow the mixture to cool to room temperature.

Assemble The Cake

Once your cakes are chilled, very carefully cut off the domes using a cake leveler or serrated knife. Use a pastry brush to gently coat the top of the cake layers with syrup from the cherry mixture.

Pipe or use an offset spatula to spread a layer of vegan whipped cream on top of the first cake layer. Follow this with a layer of boozy cherries.

Sandwich the cake with the second cake layer and add more cherry syrup and coconut whipped cream.

Lastly, this wouldn't really be a German Black Forest cake without some chocolate shavings. So we're going a step further with beautiful chocolate curls!

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