Donauwelle Cake | German recipes

Hi everyone and welcome to my channel. I have a delicious cake recipe to share with you today based on a German classic, the Donauwelle. The Donau is the second largest river in Europe and this cake is an homage to the waves that you see on the river. So I'm going to start with some special ingredients. I have some sour cherries here which will help us create that wavy shape when you cut the cake and you slice it. So I have a lot of ingredients here but in principle what we're trying to do is just a regular cake batter. We'll split that up into two batters, one which will convert to a chocolate batter and one that will remain just a vanilla cake batter. So I'm starting with some butter here as usual, unsalted butter that is at room temperature so that we beat it and it's nice and fluffy like this. To that we'll add sugar and we'll do the usual steps, adding sugar, adding eggs, flavoring and then dry ingredients. Now one tip I can give you is that when it comes to making cakes that require a creaming method like this where you have butter and sugar and you're whipping it together, you want to make sure that you wait until the whole thing changes in color. This is much paler than the original butter color and that is a good indication that you've been beating enough air into the whole thing and it will ensure that you have a very nice moist cake in the end. So I'm adding some vanilla to this because that's gonna be the base of the whole cake, the vanilla flavor. And I'm gonna add my eggs one at a time, just beating with each addition. And a second tip is when you're making this sort of cake you always want to sift your dry ingredients because that ensures that you spread it evenly in your cake batter because you don't have any lumps and also you have this additional source of air in the batter. So in it goes. I like to combine all my dry ingredients into one bowl before I sift it so that it's a second way of incorporating everything evenly. And you could do this by hand if you have the physical strength to do it or use a regular stand-up mixer. And my third tip for cake batters is you always want to finish incorporating the ingredients with a spatula in folding motions to avoid overmixing. So now that we have our basis of the cake layer we're gonna turn this into two cake batters. One that is vanilla flavored, so that's this guy right here, and half of that will be a chocolate batter. So I'm just trying to weigh out the total amount of batter and removing half of that. You could do this by eye but I think it's best to, if you have the scale at hand, please use the scale as you want an even distribution of chocolate cake and vanilla cake for the wave effect that I'm going to show you how to do later on. So to the one half of the batter I'm adding the chocolate powder, which I sift always, and some whole milk at room temperature. And I just whisk it until it's combined. And just like we did for the vanilla cake batter, we finish this with a spatula. So once you're done incorporating everything, we'll set all of the ingredients aside and prepare our pan. I'm using a rectangular shape for this, so it's kind of like a sheet cake. And I'm using a 25 by 18 centimeter ring here, rectangular tart ring. So very important, we start with the vanilla cake batter. And I'm using an offset spatula just to get into the corners and make sure that the batter is nice and level throughout the entire bottom. Now carefully I'm gonna get my chocolate cake batter and start dolloping a little bit at a time over the surface just gently, because we don't want to disturb the vanilla batter underneath. Now gently, with the same spatula, you start spreading that as evenly as possible. You want to make sure it's level and you want to make sure you get into those corners. So that's that. And here we have the sour cherries, the big wow factor for two reasons. Sour cherries are delicious because they cut through the sweetness very nicely. And the trick for those waves that you see when you cut into this cake is to push those cherries into the batter like so. And that will give you the wave effect. So I suggest that you are quite generous, like one centimeter in between each cherry is ideal. Make sure that those cherries are pitted and do not use sweet cherries, because you don't get the same effect in terms of taste. So we'll bake this and set it aside to cool while we prepare the next layer, the custard layer. And I went traditional here, which means I'm using pudding powder. And this is something that I keep seeing in a lot of German recipes. I might do a whole bunch of German recipes in general in the future for my channel, so don't be surprised if I pull this little packet out here and there. But this is what people use in reality, so I stuck with it instead of making the custard myself, which you can obviously do. So I have my pudding powder and I'm adding a little bit of vanilla and some sugar to this. Give it a nice whisk. Now if you've never used these sort of powders before, there's a lot of cornstarch in there. And one good rule of thumb when it comes to cornstarch is to make sure you mix this with some cold liquid. So that's why we added that milk straight out of the fridge. And now we get to cook this all together with the rest of the milk until we get a nice pudding-like custardy texture like this. Now we want to sieve this through to avoid getting any lumpy bits in our custard layer. So this is a little too hot for us to use at the moment, so we're going to cover this with cling film and let it come to room temperature before we proceed with the next step, which is adding some butter, which is also at room temperature. So set it to the side or put it in the fridge a little bit. Once it's at room temperature you can sort of use the mixer to beat it so that it's nice and smooth. And to that we can add already our butter, which is nice and at room temperature. And the butter will help give the pudding layer its consistency and it's going to sit really nicely on top of the cake. So you want to add the butter slowly to make sure that you're mixing it well with the pudding. You don't want any lumps in your mix. So once you're done with that we are ready to pour this over our cake layer. And this should be relatively cool, you could even have this sitting in the fridge. And if you're short on time you could make the cake layer in advance and the custard layer also in advance. Just make sure you whip it up before adding it so that you can easily spread it evenly on top of the cake. So this is ready to chill and while that's happening I'm preparing the last part of this cake, the chocolate layer. I like using dark chocolate but if you prefer milk that also would work. And to that I'm going to add some vegetable oil, although here I'm using coconut because I like the flavor. And you just want to melt this. It shouldn't be too hot because we're going to pour it over the custard layer and if it's too hot you risk melting the custard as you pour it. So just be careful with that. My cake is out of the fridge so I work really quickly when I add the chocolate. I dump it all in one go and just tilt the tray, swirl this around, make sure to get coverage in every single corner and make sure it's evenly spread. Once you're happy with the coverage you want to watch it carefully set because we want to create this wave-like effect on the chocolate. You can use a fork, a toothpick and just do little waves on top. If you see that your pattern disappears then stop and let it sit another couple of minutes before you do the pattern of the wave. Now this is what I have with a toothpick and I actually ended up going for that design. It's not perfect but it does the trick. So now it's time to cut the cake into slices and for that I'm just loosening up the sides of the ring so I can remove it gently and we also need to take this out of whatever tray it's been sitting on. So because we added that oil to the chocolate that means the top layer is a bit snappy. So what that means is that you risk cutting the cake and have it crack in different areas where you don't want it to. So what I like to do is grab a really good serrated knife and trace where I'm gonna cut and then I go over a second time through the same trace and cut. Cut all the way through in one clean swift motion. So I'm gonna get eight slices out of this cake but as you can see they're very generous and there's two reasons for that. One I love this cake and I want to eat a lot of it and the second one is the bigger the slice the more that wave effect will show in the slice. So it's a great way to show it off and I'll show you what that looks like in a second. Just a quick comment on the pudding or custard layer. You will see here that the layer is quite thin. It's not as thick as the cake layer itself so if you're a big pudding fan do not hesitate doubling up on the amount that I'm using here. That's absolutely fine. Now here is a slice where the magic happens and essentially we have where the cherry went through the chocolate batter into the vanilla batter. It creates this beautiful shape of the waves and that's the beauty of this cake as well as the flavor. It's a match made in heaven with all of these components. So I hope you try the recipe because you will love it I can guarantee that and don't forget to subscribe to like and to share for more. Thanks for watching!