Week 5: Linzer Torte

This week's cake was a very traditional Austrian cake, a Linzer Torte, that is known to be the oldest cake in the world!

The torte, which we made in a regular 9" cake pan, is like a crumbly dense spice cake with jam sandwiched in the middle.  I didn't think I would enjoy it from the description the instructor provided, but it was quite yummy.

The linzer torte can be expensive to make since it contains a lot of ground nuts, but we made it a little more affordable by substituting some of the nuts with graham cracker crumbs.  I couldn't taste the difference, but not sure if that means anything, since I've never tasted a Linzer torte before tasting the one I made :p

I found the spices to be a little strong for my liking, so if I was to make this again, I would reduce the amount of spices from 3g each to maybe 1-2g each of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg.

For the filling, we used an off the shelf raspberry jam.  I found this worked well to give moisture to the slightly dry consistency of the cake.

The batter for this cake is pretty traditional in terms of the way its made, it's butter/shortening creamed with sugar, eggs mixed in gradually and then dry ingredients gently mixed in.  The batter was spread on the bottom of the greased and lined pan, then the thin layer of jam evenly spread on the top.  The remaining batter was piped onto the top to form the lattice.  Since I only had a #6 tip for the piping, when the cake batter baked, it expanded and closed in some of the lattice top.  The lattice would come out much nicer with a #3 or #4 tip.  For decoration, we put a few almonds around the border.

This is an interesting method to make a cake, with putting jam in the middle and piping the lattice top on.  I'm interested to see if it would work on another type of cake batter.