Delicious Sacher torte and a sweet weekend gathering

Sacher torte, what do we do when there's only one slice left?

Me and my big mouth.

That's what I thought after haphazardly volunteering to prepare the cake for our weekend gathering. I have almost forgotten that I have a seven month's old baby girl and that preparing for big number of guests wouldn't be that simple. Specially now that she has improve drastically her psychomotor abilities. Meaning she's everywhere and could be pulling anything. (Grrrrrr, but still very very cute). I was thinking of making something simple and easy but then again my craziness for cooking is much stronger than my brain telling me "be logic, be logic". So I ended up buying 800 grams of dark chocolate, 500 grams of freshly picked from the farm raspberries and a two dozen of naturely grown farm eggs in the market last Friday. In short, I baked a Sacher Torte for almost twenty guests. I have never tried making this famous Austrian chocolate cake nor tasted them for that matter. I adopted my recipe from the french site of Austrian Tourism Office explaining how to make this cake and I used Pierre Herme's raspberry chocolate recipe for my glaçage.

Everybody loved it! I suppose for they were speechless and just all headed on finishing their slices on their plate.

Fresh lilas from the garden adorn the table

If you were wondering what was the occassion, it was my dad in law, sis in law, his fiancé and my brother in law's birthday celebration. No fancy menu this weekend just some green vegetable terrine and endive salad for entrée, fondue bourguignone for the main course and apple tart, sacher torte and champagne for the dessert.


Sacher Torte (you can check the original recipe here)
(recipe for one cake)
200 g of dark chocolate
8 egg yolks
120 g of melted butter
10 egg whites
1 tsp of Vanilla essence
a pinch of salt
180 of sugar
120 of sifter flour

Beat the egg yolks. Fold in the melted butter, vanilla essence and melted chocolate. Dust the flour and mix until homogenous. Whisk the egg. Add the salt; put the sugar little by little and continue whisking until it forms its peak. Put one fourth of this mixture on the chocolate mixture. Mix carefully then add directly on the whisk egg whites and mix gently. Pour this mixture on two round pans (of 22cm in diameter and 4 cm depth) with buttered baking paper inside. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes at 180° celsius.

Chocolate Raspberry Glaçage
14 cl of heavy cream
150 g of raspberries
20 of butter
200 g of dark chocolate

Put the raspberries on an electric mixer and blend it. Pass this purée on a streamer to remove the seeds. Melt the chocolate in bain marie and in a separate casserole warm up the heavy cream. Put the warm heavy cream on the melted chocolate and mix delicately. Add the raspberry purée. Add the butter and continue mixing;

Assembling the cake. Put a raspberry preserves on the middle of the two cakes to stick them together. Then pour in the chocolate glaçage; Let it stand in the fridge for at least two hours.

The famous yogurt-apple tart of my sister in law

Parade of champagne glasses, anything becomes great with a glass of champagne