Grandma Cake¶
381 words on Food
Be warned that I’ll take a short break from my usual stance of food snobbery here and do true low-fi lazy food.
When I was shopping on Saturday with my freshly fixed MacBook I felt like having some cake. That’s nothing unusual as I almost always feel like having some cake. But I felt like fruit cake. And it was hot. And that made me think of the cakes my grandma used to make which I loved as a kid.
And while my grandma could cook and bake well – she was the one who introduced me to the insanely great Träubletorte – the dirty secret of this cake is that it’s so full of readymade ingredients and so lacking any effort that it’s hard to believe. And hence I wen shopping and bought:
- a 500g glass of conserved cherries
- a pastry case
- a pack of glaze (Tortenguß )
Those things are both cheap and easy to get. Making the actual cake is as easy: First you unpack the pastry case and open the glass of cherries. Then you mix the small pack of Tortenguß with a bit of sugar and the juice from the cherries and put that mix on the stove until it cooks a little. While that happens you distribute the cherries on the pastry case. And finally you pour the glaze over. Done.
Now you’ll just have to wait a little longer until everything is cold. And preferably whip some cream - which I couldn’t because I hadn’t any. Still, it is a reasonably nice snack and rather easy to make. Of course refinements are possible and probably obligatory if you’re a grandmother. Add a tin of conserved tangerines beween the cherries, or put some sliced almonds on top – both are welcome additions to the cake.
I guess I could go all snobbish on that again. Start making my own sponge cake and hope that it comes out nicely, pick your own fresh cherries (season and a few decades of tree growth permitting…) and make your own glaze starting with sugar or agar-agar or whatever is in there. But if I wanted to go all fancy, I would have made Träubletorte to begin with I suppose.
Oh, and 26°C, Tapas for dinner with a friend…
