passover desserts

honey nut cake

Passover cake.  Kind of an oxymoron, right?  For Passover you're not supposed to eat anything leavened, which includes, cake, bread, cookies, waffles, pancakes, and pasta - pretty much anything worthwhile in the land of carbs. 

However, we wily Jews can make lemonade out of any lemony situation, and have found a way to have our cake and eat it too, even during Passover. 

The Torah says you're not allowed to eat any wheat, barley, rye, spelt, or oats that have come in contact with water for more than 18 minutes before being cooked.  But if you mix together flour and water and cook it before 18 minutes elapses, then grind the resultant crackers back into powder, you can use that for baking cakes, dumplings, pancakes, or basically anything you like.  This magical get-out-of-carbo-jail-free substance is commonly known as matzoh meal.

I will admit that I was not too optomistic about the prospect of a matzoh meal cake.  The only Passover cake I'd heard of previous to this week was matzoh meal sponge cake.  I was not enthused.  I don't even like regular sponge cake - it's dry, rubbery, and tasteless.  So taking dry, tasteless cake and substituting matzoh meal for the flour did not seem like a great culinary idea.

However, the idea of substituting ground nuts for the flour did seem like a good one.  I made an almond cake a few weeks ago that was absolutely divine (soon I will get around to posting about it, I promise!) and something rich and nutty sounded like just the thing for Jorie's and my Sephardic-inspired seder menu.  Fortunately epicurious.com has a wealth of great sounding non-sponge cake Passover dessert recipes.  I decided to put two of them to the test this week.

The first one was a Honey Nut Cake, pictured above.  Basically it's ground almonds and walnuts mixed with sugar, eggs, oil, and a little tiny bit of matzoh cake meal, baked, and then soaked in a honey-orange syrup.  I tested this dessert on our dinner guests, Heather and Johnny, last Saturday night.  Nutty, sweet, sticky, and vaguely Greek-seeming, this cake went perfectly with the yummy dessert wine Heather had brought from her collection.  Everyone reached for seconds, so I considered the dessert a success.

walnut tweed cake

The next night I tried a different Passover cake recipe out on another pair of unsuspecting guinea pigs, our friends Josh and Josie who had invited us over for a delicious Sunday dinner.  The second cake recipe was called Walnut Tweed Cake.  This one had only one kind of nut - walnuts - but included the additional step of toasting them before grinding them into a kind of nut flour.  The speckled look of the tiny bits of toasted walnut mixed with grated bittersweet chocolate is what gives the cake its name.  A third element of orange juice and zest gave this cake a very complex and appealing flavor.  But the thing that really blew my mind was the texture of the cake.  Due to eight stiffly beaten egg whites mixed gently into the batter, it had a light fluffy texture that was so perfectly cakey, it seems almost sacreligious to serve it on Passover.  But Jon and I both agreed this cake won the taste-test battle, so sacrilege it is.  As Homer Simpson would say, "Mmmm, sacrilicious!"

Recipe note: If by any chance you cannot find matzoh cake meal (in Chicago look for it at Dominick's on Division) you can make your own by pulsing regular unsalted matzoh meal in a clean coffee grinder until it resembles the consistency of flour.

Honey Nut Cake
from A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking by Marcy Goldman via epicurious
Ingredients:
Cake
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup vegetable oil
3 eggs
3 tablespoons orange juice
1 teaspoon finely minced orange zest
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon ( or 1/2 teaspoon for a more pronounced cinnamon flavor)
1/2 cup matzoh cake meal
1/2 cup finely chopped hazelnuts or almonds
1 cup finely chopped walnuts

Soaking Syrup
2/3 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup honey
1/3 cup orange juice
1/4 cup water
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Generously grease a 7-inch round layer cake pan (if you do not have one, you can use a round foil pan of the same or similar size available in the supermarket baking aisle).

Cake:
In a medium-sized mixing bowl, using a wire whisk, beat the granulated and brown sugars with the oil and eggs until the mixture is thick and pale yellow. Stir in the remaining batter ingredients. Turn the batter into the prepared pan.

Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, or until the top is light brown and set. Cool for at least 20 minutes. Meanwhile, prepare the Soaking Syrup.

Soaking Syrup:
In a medium saucepan, combine the ingredients. Heat to dissolve the sugar and simmer for 5 to 10 minutes, until the mixture becomes syrupy. Cool well.

Pour the cooled syrup over the cooled cake, poking holes in the cake with a fork, to permit the syrup to penetrate. Allow it to stand for 2 to 4 hours to absorb the syrup. I prefer to refrigerate this cake so that while it is absorbing the liquid, it is also firming up. Also, chilling the cake offsets its sweetness and makes it easier to cut. Serve it on splayed muffin liners.

Serves 10-12.  To serve more, double the recipe and bake it in a rectangular 9x13 pan (or 2 round cake pans).

Walnut Tweed Torte
adapted from Gourmet magazine via epicurious
Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups walnuts (51/2 oz), toasted in a 275 degree oven for 15-20 minutes and cooled
1/2 cup matzo cake meal
8 large eggs, separated, at room temperature for 30 minutes
1 1/3 cups sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons finely grated fresh orange zest
1/4 cup fresh orange juice
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 oz bittersweet chocolate (not unsweetened), coarsely grated using 1/4-inch teardrop-shaped holes of a box grater, or just pulsed in a food processor if you find grating a candybar as much of a pain in the ass as I do.

Instructions:
Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 350°F.

Insert bottom of a 10 inch springform pan upside down (so that turned-up edge faces down for easier removal of cake).  Grease well and dust with matzo cake meal to coat.

Pulse walnuts with 3 tablespoons matzo cake meal in a food processor until nuts are finely chopped (be careful not to pulse to a paste). Add remaining 5 tablespoons matzo cake meal and pulse until mixture resembles a grainy flour.

Beat egg whites with a pinch of salt in a bowl with an electric mixer at medium-high speed until they form soft peaks. Add 2/3 cup sugar a little at a time, beating until whites just hold stiff peaks.

Beat together yolks and remaining 2/3 cup sugar with 1/2 teaspoon salt in a large bowl at medium-high speed until thick and pale, about 3 minutes in a standing mixer or about 5 minutes with a handheld. Fold in nut flour, then zest, juice, and vanilla. Fold grated chocolate into batter gently but thoroughly. Fold in one third of whites to lighten batter, then fold in remaining whites gently but thoroughly.

Pour batter into greased and dusted springform pan, smoothing top, and bake until a wooden pick or skewer inserted in center comes out clean, 50 minutes to 1 hour. Cool in pan on a rack 15 minutes, then run a thin sharp knife between cake and side of pan. Remove side of pan and cool cake completely. Invert cake onto rack and run knife between cake and bottom of pan to remove bottom, then flip onto a plate.  If you like, top with lightly sweetened whipped cream.

Serves 8-10