Polish Housewife

Polish recipes served up with tidbits of folklore, customs, and history

Catalan Salt Pinch Cake

by 5 Comments

Heavenly Cake Baker Submission #52

I made the Mud Turtle Cupcakes back in February.  As I recall, my favorite part was the topping.  When choosing my free choice for the week, finding something simple was a consideration.  There’s just so much going on in Poznan this weekend: Ethno Port music festival, a horse show, a new driving range to check out.  Baking will probably have to be squeezed into non-daylight hours, and we don’t have many of those this time of year.

Catalan Salt Pinch Cake was the lucky winner.  It looked like an easy cake.  I still need to bake it and Jenn doesn’t.  So there you go.

Rose talks about this being known as pinch bread in Barcelona.  I can only imagine that it is a very localized dish.  We spent four years in Spain, but never made it to Barcelona in our travels.  This bread or cake is new to me.

The cake was easy to make and reminds me a lot of angel food cake, but it does use yolks.

Lining the pan with parchment was one of the more complicated steps.
Rose recommends using sliced almonds to make it easier to grind the nuts before they begin to turn into almond butter.  I was only able to find whole almonds.  After roasting, I gave them a rough chop with a knife before adding them to the sugar in the food processor.  They ground down nicely.
The next step was to beat egg whites with a little sugar; then fold in the ground almonds.  I took the full 25 minutes to add the beaten eggs to the almond meringue.  Then carefully folded lemon zest and little cake flour into the fluffy almond egg mixture.
My cake took just over 35 minutes in the oven.  It came out perfect and fluffy.
Within a few minutes, the sides and center began to shrink  and pull in.
But the shrinking didn’t go too far.  Rose does tell us to expect the center to drop a bit.
The cake was a hit at our house.  Ed planned to have only one slice, but instead had three.  It’s so light and fluffy; it was easy to do.  I guess that’s an advantage to pinching rather than slicing.  You won’t know how much you’ve had.

Unlike my other blog posts, as part of the Heavenly Cake Bakers, I don’t post recipes from this book on the Internet. One of the reasons for this baking group is to encourage readers to purchase the cookbook. That strategy worked on me! After follow the group’s baking adventures for a couple of months, I ordered a copy from Amazon because I wanted join in.

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Comments

  1. Vicki

    Your’s turned out fantastically well! I do no remember this cake with much fondness. It was an utter flop three times over. What kind of horse show?

    Reply

  2. Lois B

    Thank you, Vicki. Wow, three tries; you are a dedicated baker. I’ve inserted a link to the horse show. I suspect you’ll know more about it than I do.

    Reply

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