There are still so many cakes that deserve more attention and to be famed and eaten. Each has a different history, whether made by protege expert chocolatiers of Swiss origin, who were in love with chocolate desserts, or something out of a nightmare of witch hunts. This is the final instalment of cakes from around the world, ending with cakes starting with the alphabet “Z”.
This cake is a Hong Kong speciality which is baked in parchment paper and served with the paper intact. It's one of the most recognised and easy-to-find cakes across the region. It's essentially a chiffon cake that is sold with its paper cup intact and in America’s Chinatown, it's referred to as sponge cake. They are typically made in a wok pan, at least in their native Hong Kong. The fluffiness comes from the egg whites and the egg yolks being whisked separately.
Coming from Switzerland's Zug area, Zuger Kirschtorte is a layered cake that has sponge cake layers with buttercream and nutty meringue in it. It's decorated with roasted almonds and powdered sugar. The sponge cake uses Kirschwasser, a cherry brandy that is also used in the famous German black forest cake. The cake thus takes on its name from the brandy and its location in this part of Switzerland. It was first made by a pastry chef called Heinrich Höhn in the year 1921 in Treichler, a coffee house and a confectionery place. The cake is said to have been eaten by the famous Audrey Hepburn and even Charlie Chaplin.
This cake has nothing to do with Halloween and comes from Salem, in the US where the infamous Salem witch trials occurred for over a year in the late 1600s. It is said that some children fell ill after eating a cake baked by a slave in a house habited by two women. The women did not attend church and were said to have strange habits, in a time religion and family were at the forefront of society. The rest… is for the history books and one of inhuman brutality. The cake is a simple cinnamon apple cake that comes from Brazil that uses nuts and raisins and is baked in a bundt pan.
From the sunny shores of Italian Tuscany comes Zuccotto which was said to be inspired by the Medici family from Florence. This dome-shaped cake with a ricotta-based filling was invented by Bernardo Buontalenti (also invented gelato) and called “Catherine's Helmet” in honour of Catherine de Medici, around the 1600s. By the 1700s as the prominence of the church rose, it was said to have been made to resemble the dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral in Florence. This famed dessert is made inside a mould with soft ladyfingers or sponge cake in a dome shape. It is filled with a filling that in the olden days consisted of chocolate syrup layered between a mixture of dried fruits and nuts. Only in the 1900s did the cake adapt to modern cake trends and substituted this filling with whipped cream, ricotta, or ice cream.
True to its Hungarian roots, Zserbó is a chocolate cake that uses apricot jam and was invented by Émile Gerbeaud, who was a Swiss chocolatier, whose family was also in the chocolate business; his surname is pronounced Zserbó, so that’s how the cake got its name. The cake wasn’t an accidental discovery and its appeal lies in the sophisticated look of the cake which is the perfect amount of dense and moist. Gerbeaud moved to Budapest in 1884, upon the invitation of Henrik Kugler, the owner of Kugler coffee house and pâtisserie, which in the modern world stands as the famous Café Gerbeaud. Kugler was looking for someone talented to take forward his confectionary business and Gerbeaud was the protege, who had been in the business since a very young age. It didn’t take long for the Swiss maestro to win the appreciation of the Hungarian society and he earned his mettle in Budapest and served it for a very long time.
A cake from the Italian mountainside, Zelten is baked during Christmas and aptly so because it’s a fruitcake. Come Christmas, this cake fills up the shelves of bakeries and pastry shops of the Trentino-Alto Adige region. Locally the recipe differs but the dough almost always contains flour, eggs, butter, sugar, and yeast, with an assortment of local dried fruits – raisins, dried figs, almonds, pine nuts, and walnuts. The name of the cake that is bread-like comes from the German word "selten" which means “sometimes”, because it's a winter cake, although you can find this cake during other times of the year as well.
Translating to “juicy”, referring to the moistness of the cake, Zoumero is a Greek chocolate cake that is airy, whose moistness comes from the drizzled chocolate syrup on the cake sponges. It comes from the Chania region and tastes best when eaten with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. The cake batter is made with flour, eggs, vanilla extract, cocoa powder and baking powder. Once the fluffy cake is fully baked, the cool chocolate syrup, made with milk, sugar, butter, and cocoa, is drizzled down the surface of the cake, letting it soak up.