Sachertorte

Sachertorte is a chocolate cake with a firm, slightly dry crumb, made with butter, eggs, sugar, flour and chocolate. After baking, it is covered with a layer of hot apricot jam on top and on the sides and then coated with a cooked sugar-and-chocolate icing that dries smooth and glossy. In many recipes the jam is also placed in the middle, between two cake layers.

The history told by the Traditional Foods Register of the Austrian Ministry of Agriculture begins in 1832. Prince Metternich, chancellor of the empire, asked the kitchen for a special dessert for his guests, and the task fell to Franz Sacher, a 16-year-old apprentice. He created the basic form of the cake.

Franz’s son, Eduard Sacher, learned the trade in a court confectionery and later opened a hotel in Vienna in 1876, which helped spread the cake worldwide. In the following decades the hotel and the pastry shop fought in court over the right to sell the cake as the original and over the question of the jam in the middle. The dispute ended in an agreement in 1963: both establishments continued making the cake, under different names and seals.

The name Sachertorte is not a registered trademark: pastry shops throughout Austria and cookbooks use it.