Current reading: this wikipedia page about Café Europa, a "cultural initiative of the Austrian presidency of the European Union", in which every EU member nation brought a nationally beloved cake to an international cake celebration.
The thing is, if a beloved cake or biscuit tastes good to naïve tastebuds then a lot of the time it stops being a national delicacy and becomes an international delicacy. The Café Europa list is therefore a list of cakes that taste good if you grew up with them. You know the sort of thing:
- This yeasted delicacy comprises layers of a chewy dough made from flour and water, alternating with a paste of apple seeds.
- This wafer, immersed in water until damp, is shaped around a sphere of pink cream and then hardened in the sun.
- This light biscuit is formed from the whites of forty eggs mixed with however much sugar you require to give you a headache, spooned into conical cases and baked until dry.
See for example the Netherlands' contribution of the tompouce, a pastry whose own wikipedia page has an extended section titled "eating the tompouce", a process which it describes as "difficult and messy".
The outsider-hostile cake is, to be clear, a really outstanding category of cake. I've talked on cohost before about the lamington, Australia's inevitable contribution to a hypothetical global cake buffet: a cube of dry sponge covered on all six sides with slightly chocolatey frosting and then covered again in desiccated coconut, or possibly paper shavings, it's not always possible to tell from taste alone. It is extremely delicious to me. I just love the idea of a huge buffet of cakes surrounded by milling ambassadors, each of whom is required by politeness to avoid the cake they brought and love and instead to eat a confusing and slightly unpleasant cake provided by their neighbour.
