How to make the rectangular cake become a round one - „Donauwelle“

Well, we wanted to bake that classic German Donauwelle and try to make a fancy cake out of it. And it did work, it doesn't always have to be rectangular :)

There are probably hundreds of recipes out there for this delicious cake, but we chose the following:

Recipe

Cake base

350g      Butter

7            eggs

300g      sugar

1 pck     vanilla sugar

500g      flour

1 pck     baking powder

4-5 tbsp cocoa powder
1-2         glasses morello cherries

Start by beating the butter and sugar until creamy, then add the eggs one by one. Now add the vanilla sugar and beat until combined. Finally, sieve in the flour and baking powder and fold in.

For this round version I spread 2/3 of the dough onto two greased 28cm spring forms and mixed the remaining third with 4 tbsp of cocoa powder. Put that aside.

Drain the cherries and distribute them evenly on your cakes and press them in gently.

I then spread the dark dough over the cherries to keep them from burning. It also gives a little extra to the taste and is an important part of the original Donauwelle.

Now put them one after the other in the oven and bake at 180C/356F (circulating air) for about 30 minutes (babysit your oven). We baked all of them on the lowest rack. Of course you could fit at least two in the oven at the same time, but then you have to make sure to take the top one out earlier. Let cool for a few minutes in the baking pans, then remove and place on a cake grid to cool completely.

Cream

This recipe is a mixture of the cream of Donauwelle and Rheinwelle. Both named after big rivers in Europe. It gives you a filling that is rather stiff and therefore perfect for this type of cake.

750ml  milk

2 pck   vanilla pudding

50g      sugar

300g    butter (soft)

Prepare the pudding according to recipe and let cool to room temperature. Stir once in a while or cover with plastic wrap to prevent it from forming a skin.

Now beat the butter until creamy and add the pudding bit by bit. Taste the cream now to get the right sweetness. If you need more, add icing sugar.

Chocolate glazing

300g  dark chocolate

20g    coconut fat

On a normal Donauwelle, the glazing goes on top of the cake. Now this will be a themed cake, so we put it inside. Melt the chocolate and the fat over simmering water and let cool for about 15 minutes.

Now lets stack this cake :) Place the cake (flat side down) in a cake ring, add the cream and the glazing and finish with the second cake (flat side up).

We placed this in the fridge overnight to let it stiffen up. Before you take off the ring, take a knife and cut around your cake. Worked nicely all so far :)

To make it „fondant-proof“, we added ganache (because we like ganache better than butter cream). Then we wrapped it up in plastic wrap to keep it from drying out. If you intend to cover your cake with fondant straight away, you can omit this step of course :)