I’d like to share the recipe of the Donauwellen from this post, adapted from the German recipe book Backen Macht Freude, Das Original by Dr. Oetker. I have a feeling that almost every German household has this recipe book because every German lady that I’ve come across seems to have baked a cake from this recipe book.

This cake is baked on a squarish baking tray with the size 40×30cm.

Donauwellen

Ingredients for the cake batter:
2 cans of pitted sour cherries (drained weight for each can 350g)
250g soft margarine or butter
200g sugar
1 packet of vanilla sugar
1 pinch of salt
5 eggs
375g flour
3 tsp baking powder
20g unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tbsp milk

For the buttercream you need:
1 packet vanilla pudding powder
100g sugar
500ml milk
250g soft butter

For the chocolate coating:
200g bittersweet chocolate
2 tbsp cooking oil

Now roll up your sleeves:
1. Drain the sour cherries well, grease the baking tray and preheat the oven at 180°C (if you are using hot-air oven, bake at 160°C without preheating).

2. Beat the soft margarine or butter in a big mixing bowl until smooth with a hand mixer. Add sugar, vanilla sugar and salt one after the other while still mixing until combined. Then beat in each egg one by one. Allocate about 1/2min for each egg and beat at the highest level of your mixer.

3. Mix flour with baking powder, sieve into the cake batter and mix well. Coat the baking tray with 2/3 of the cake batter.

4. Mix the cocoa powder with milk into the rest 1/3 of the cake batter and coat this dark cake batter on top of the (white) cake batter on the baking tray.

5. Place cherries on some paper towel to drain off excessive water and lay the cherries on top the dark cake batter in rows about 1″ to 1.5″ away from each other. Use a spoon to press the cherries into the cake batter (you don’t have to press them all the way down, maybe halfway into the batter).

6. Bake this batter for about 40min.

7. Let the cake cool completely on the rack after baking.

8. Now, while waiting for the cake to cool, prepare the buttercream using pudding powder, 100g sugar and milk according to the instructions of the pudding packet. Let the pudding cool but make sure you stir it occasionally to avoid a skin from forming at the top layer.

9. Mix the soft butter with mixer in a mixing bowl until smooth and tablespoon-wise, mix in the cooled pudding. Make sure that both butter and pudding are at room temperature before mixing to avoid the mixture from curdling.

10. Spread the buttercream on top of the cake batter (about half an inch thick) and chill it in fridge for about 1hr.

11. For the chocolate layer at the top, break the bittersweet chocolate chunks into smaller size and melt them together with the cooking oil in a warm water bath while stirring them continuously. Finally spread the chocolate on top of the buttercream. Use a fork and move it over the chocolate coating to make some waves!

It might sound like it’s a lot of work, but in the end, when the cake melts in your mouth, the taste is worth every bit of your effort. I use this instant vanilla pudding powder to prepare the buttercream. It weighs about 50gm and the vanilla sugar (the yellow packet) weighs about 10gm.

Guten Appetit!