My beautiful niece, Venice Rose, turned Sweet 16 on Christmas Day and, since our families always spend the holidays together, I made her cake.  She didn’t want the typical Sweet 16 cake and decided instead on this decadent black forest dome cake.  This is my version of a cake I saw on the Sprinkles Bakes blog (check it out for terrific recipes and gorgeous photographs!).

Black forest is a traditional German cake named for the Black Forest region of Southwest Germany and features one of its main crops, cherries.  This cake is a dense dark chocolate with a filling made from Morello cherries, with each layer soaked in kirsch, a cherry fruit brandy.  The cake is also typically filled with a whipped cream, but the recipe I made has a boiled vanilla frosting, which tastes somewhat like really good Twinkie filling and holds up much better when there isn’t enough fridge space available to keep it cool (typical at my house at Christmas-time).  The chocolate decorations I made with leaf and pinecone molds.  I frosted it with a thick layer of fudge-y chocolate buttercream and dusted it with powdered sugar.  Very festive to serve for a birthday party on Christmas Eve!  A beautiful, sweet, decadent cake for a beautiful, sweet and altogether atypical girl on her 16th birthday!  Happy Birthday, my dear Venice!