How did Black Forest cake become the world’s favorite dessert?

By Priya Krishna, The New York Times

It’s a classic Trinidadian dessert — a chocolate cake soaked in overproof rum and topped with swoops of ultrapasteurized whipped cream.

But wait: It’s also a signature Pakistani cake, saturated with cherry brandy essence. And a Chilean cake, festooned with locally grown cherries. And a Lebanese cake — not too sweet, with little to no alcohol. And a Nepali cake. And a Zimbabwean cake. It’s even popular on the remote islands of Fiji.

What kind of dessert could inspire such a territorial dispute?

It’s Black Forest cake, named for a corner of Germany that still conjures images of fairy tales.

Try telling that to the rest of the world. The cake, long an adopted favorite in many countries, is more popular than ever — except perhaps in Germany. Thanks in part to a recent wave of ’90s-era nostalgia among younger generations, it’s found new life on social media and in restaurants across the world. Google searches for “Black Forest cake” have nearly doubled in volume over the last 10 years, most of them seeking a recipe.

Today, Black Forest cake belongs to everyone and no one. It’s the Danish butter-cookie tin of desserts — a European artifact that has come to transcend cultures. In fact, several people interviewed for this article were astonished to hear that the cake didn’t hail from their native country.

The traditional version layers cherry brandy-infused chocolate spongecake with airy whipped cream and cherry ornaments. But Natasha Laggan, 40, who runs a Trinidadian cooking account on Instagram and YouTube and lives in Davie, Florida, long believed that the traditional liquor for the cake was rum — the spirit used in most of the restaurant versions she ate during her childhood in California, Trinidad.

Kudakwashe Makoni, 44, a chef from Harare, Zimbabwe, insisted that his nation’s cows lend a distinctly rich flavor to the cake’s cream. “Nobody does a Black Forest like Zimbabwe,” he said.

When his family moved to Dallas in 2000, he was shocked to see Black Forest cake at a local bakery. He wondered: Why was an American shop serving a Zimbabwean dessert?

The cake’s very name proclaims its Teutonic origin. But some people said they thought “Black Forest” referred to the chocolate shavings on the cake.

Sumayya Usmani, a Glasgow, Scotland, food writer and cookbook author from Karachi, Pakistan, long thought the Black Forest was a sort of fantasy realm. “It had this Narnia image in my mind, where there is beautiful snow and cherries and chocolate shavings,” she said.

In Pakistan, the cake is a staple of any respected bakery, said Usmani, 51. It is “exotic and foreign, but very much part of the culture.”

Dessert trends come and go, yet Black Forest remains the cartoonish archetype of a celebration cake, with its eye-catching cherry garnish and contrasting black-and-white layers.

“It looks like the kind of cake you would draw if you were a child and you were drawing the perfect cake,” said Helen Goh, a cookbook author in London.

That simplicity, and a flavor combination that can feel both familiar and unfamiliar, may help explain how a cake from Germany — a country that exerts a narrow culinary influence globally — captivated such an expansive audience.

The first time Kashish Shrestha, 41, a writer and photographer, tasted Black Forest cake at a bakery in Kathmandu, Nepal, the texture reminded him of ras malai, a milky, spongy South Asian sweet. In Nepal, “Black Forest” is often used as a generic term for any kind of cake, he said.

Ramin Ganeshram, a Trinidadian American culinary historian in Westport, Connecticut, said the cake recalled the rum-soaked Caribbean black cake.

As a child in Singapore, cookbook author Sharon Wee thought of Black Forest cake as a fancier version of chiffon cakes, which became popular there in the 1950s. Serving her friends a Black Forest cake on her birthday was a status symbol — “like toting your Hermès bag to primary school,” said Wee, 53, who splits her time between New York City and Singapore.

The same cannot be said in Germany, where the cake is seen as “sort of old-fashioned,” said Janosch Förster, a research follow at the German Archive of Culinary Arts.

Both its creator and birthplace are still a matter of debate; some say it came from the Black Forest region, others say Berlin. But it is unquestionably a German invention, from sometime in the early 20th century.

“It is basically just a standard, not-so-interesting cake,” said Andreas Klöckner, CEO of Goldhahn und Sampson, a culinary store and cooking school in Berlin. “It has a different standing outside Germany as something special.”

The cake’s travels most likely occurred as Germans moved around the world as immigrants, missionaries, chefs in high-end hotels and refugees escaping Nazism in the 1930s — or Nazis fleeing after World War II, said José López Ganem, the executive director of the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

One of the most effective proselytizers of Black Forest cake was probably the British Empire, said Carla Martin, the institute’s president.

“There was a lot of German technique and German cuisine that got spread through British association,” she said. “They were the capital center of the world. They were taking traditions of the European continent and expanding them, and they were the best at it.”

Black Forest cake had a lot going for it. Its ingredients, particularly cocoa powder, were becoming more readily available, said Ganeshram, the culinary historian. The alcohol preserved the cake, extending its shelf life in tropical climates.