Sachertorte (or “torta Sacher,” as it’s called in Italian) is a traditional Viennese torte composed of layers of chocolate cake, with a glaze made of apricot jam and covered in chocolate ganache. It is popular throughout much of northern Italy and nowhere more so than Trieste, once the chief port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the location of the real-life Pasticceria Penso.
I wasn’t planning to show the inside of these cakes, so I just used plain brown polymer clay, cut to size. (Since I didn’t have a circle cutter of the precise size I needed for the larger cakes, my husband was resourceful enough to make me one with his 3D printer!) Once they were baked, I spread the top and sides with a mixture of TLS (Translucent Liquid Sculpey) and dark brown soft pastels.
I then covered the sides with chocolate sprinkles, which I had left over from an earlier gelateria project. That was the most tedious part, as they didn’t want to stick to the cakes in a nice, neat layer—though they did want to stick to my fingers and practically everything else. I ended up placing many of them on individually, which literally took several hours.
After a second baking, I was ready to attempt the piped lettering on top of the larger cakes, which is a common presentation in many bakeries. You’ll notice that the sprinkles, which were made using plain Premo burnt umber clay, are a bit lighter in color than the ganache. I wanted the lettering to be a little darker, closer to the color of the ganache, so I came up with a mix of burnt umber, translucent, and black clay. I rolled this into some thin strings, which I carefully coaxed into place, using some TLS to “glue” them down. After a final baking, I gave the tops a coat of matte varnish. I’d learned from past projects that my brand of matte varnish isn’t truly matte. There’s a very slight sheen, less shiny than satin varnish but just enough to give the chocolate glaze a realistic finish.
Many of the cakes and tarts that I’m planning for both Pasticceria Penso and Gelateria Bocelli will need some type of plate underneath. The real Pasticceria Penso uses gold foil-lined paper plates, but these seemed too difficult to recreate. Instead, I was inspired by the flat, gold cardboard bases that I’ve seen in photos from other bakeries. I had plenty of gold vinyl adhesive left over from the lettering on the Penso sign, so it was easy to stick some of that to a sheet of cardstock. I had previously bought a 1″ scalloped hole punch and used that to cut out one of these bases, which was the perfect size for my larger sachertortes. However, the challenge then became how to resize this to adapt to the mini cakes, as well as multiple other sizes I’ll need for future projects.
I tried scanning the shape and resizing it in Photoshop, with the intent to cut out custom sizes using our Cricut cutting machine. Unfortunately, this wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Getting a smooth edge from a scanned JPEG image takes more skill than I possess, and I don’t have the software to convert it to a vector image. I ended up using the original image as a guide and creating my own Photoshop image using multiple solid black circles. Then I could alter the size as needed. Once I had a bunch cut out, it was simply a matter of gluing the cakes to the base.
