Dear Reader,
This weekend I fulfilled my end of a bargain. My kid had gone a whole month without a potty training accident. So I baked a cake.
You’ve got to celebrate the wins, right? And with a kid—probably with all of us—having something to look forward to can make all manner of frustration somewhat more bearable. As January progressed, accident-free, I penciled in Saturday, January 24 as the perfect day to bake our celebratory cake.
So I got up early with the kid. Soon, though, I saw the news: another protester dead in Minneapolis. The morning progressed, and a dozen video angles trickled out across social media. The feds lied brazenly about what happened. We learned who Alex Pretti was: his name, his job, his picture, his voice. Suddenly, it felt like an extra good idea to put the phone down and bake a cake with my kid.
We watched the stand mixer beat two egg whites into a stiff foam. We added sugar and watched the foam turn glossy. We piped the meringue mixture onto a cookie sheet. When the meringues came out of the oven we each tasted one, then set the rest aside to cool.
We cut up prunes and coated them in flour. We mixed up a stiff cake batter and smooshed it into a pan, put it in the oven. The apartment filled with the smell of flour and sugar and butter all baking together.
As my heart beat with waves of pain and grief and fear, it felt right to bake a cake called Ruins of a Russian Count’s Castle. How nice to think of the palaces of the powerful falling into ruin. Nature is healing. Get in my belly!
And then of course the kid did have a pee accident, in the car, right before we were going to frost the cake. Dad, am I wearing a diaper? he asked. A classic in the genre of questions to which you already know the answer. No, honey, you’re not.
We ate the cake. It was delicious. It didn’t make everything better all at once—kitchen spells rarely do. But it helped one little corner of everything get through a tough day.
I hope you, dear reader, are getting through these tough days alright, too. Thanks, as always, for reading.
– Jasper
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Ruins of a Russian Count’s Castle
I’ve always loved Georg Büchner’s demand: “Peace to the cottages! War on the palaces!” And who can forget Jean Jacques Rousseau’s apocryphal imperative: “Eat the rich!”
Friends, Romans, countrymen, what if there was a way to actually do all this, at least symbolically? And what if it required nothing more than baking and eating my favorite cake?
I present you with Ruins of a Russian Count’s Castle: a prune cake with whipped-cream-and-sour-cream frosting, all topped with meringues, a drizzle of dark chocolate, and the just-right name.
This classic Russian cake exists in many variations (to verify, just search for “торт графские развалины”). These cakes’ unifying trait is looking like ridiculous, edible palaces. As the travelers and cookbook writers Caroline Eden and Eleanor Ford explain, “There are many different versions including meringue, sponge, even profiteroles, but always piled into precarious towers like the crumbling ruins of a hilltop castle.”
Many of the most fun desserts—for instance baked Alaska, s’mores, gingerbread men—gain extra deliciciusness from their name. Add Ruins of a Russian Count’s Castle to this number. Sure, it would still be a delicious dish without the name. But add the name, and the cake snaps into superb focus.
I love Eden and Ford’s recipe for this cake. They published it in their cookbook, Samarkand: Recipes and Stories from Central Asia & the Caucasus. This book is a portal: a road trip through Central Asia, full of beautiful photographs and generous stories, along with excellent recipes. I highly recommend the book. I’ve cooked from it with great pleasure and to great effect for almost a decade now.
But my favorite recipe, the one I return to again and again, is Ruins of a Russian Count’s Castle. It’s just a strange and wonderful thing to eat. The base cake is nearly shortbread—it calls for just a single egg and otherwise gets moisture only from 5 tablespoons of butter. This can seem strangely dry when you take it out of the pan. But the dryness is counterbalanced by the great quantities of whipped up whipping cream and sour cream that make up the frosting. And the meringues add a wonderful crispiness (on their exteriors) and chewiness (on their interiors) that play against the smooth luxury of the frosting and the prune-studded butteriness of the cake. Put this all together, call it Ruins of a Russian Count’s Castle, and I can pretty much guarantee that any guest you serve it to will be curious, surprised, and then totally delighted.
Here’s the recipe, lightly adapted from Samarkand:
Ruins of a Russian Count’s Castle
Ingredients
For the meringues
2 large egg whites
⅓ cup superfine sugar (you can make your own in a spinning-blade coffee grinder)
½ cup confectioners’ sugar, sifted
2 tsp cocoa powder, sifted
For the cake
½ cup dried prunes, pitted and coarsely chopped
½ cup walnuts or pecans, coarsely chopped
⅔ cup all-purpose flour
1½ tsp baking powder
5 tbsp soft butter, plus extra for greasing
⅓ cup superfine sugar
1 jumbo egg
2 ounces dark chocolate, for decorating
For the cream
¾ cup heavy cream
¾ cup sour cream
Directions
Step 1: Make the Meringues
Preheat the oven to 200°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
Whisk the egg whites to the soft peak stage and add the superfine sugar, a spoonful at a time, whisking until the mixture is thick, very glossy, and very smooth. Fold in the confectioners’ sugar, add the cocoa powder, and fold until the brown just ripples through the white. Spoon or pipe meringues about 1½ inches in diameter on the parchment paper. (If possibly, definitely do use a piping bag, as it will make taller, more tower-like meringues.) Bake for 1 hour, or until firm and crisp. Cool and store in an airtight container until needed.
Step 2: Make the cake
Preheat the oven to 325°F. Grease and line an 8-inch cake pan.
Start by mixing the prunes and nuts with a small spoonful of the flour, just to give them a dusty coating. Set aside. Sift the remaining flour and the baking powder into a roomy mixing bowl. Add the butter, sugar, and egg, and use a hand-held mixer to mix for about 1 minute until smooth and creamy. Use a metal spoon to fold the prunes and nuts into the mixture, and spread the mixture into the cake pan. Bake for 25 minutes, or until the cake is springy to the touch. Turn out onto a wire rack and let cool completely.
Step 3: Make the cream
Beat the two creams together until they just form stiff peaks.
Step 4: Assemble the cake
Spread the top and sides of the cake with some of the cream. Coarsely crumble four or five of the meringues into the remaining cream and fold together. Pile this mixture in a mound on top of the cake. Position the remaining meringues into the cream to cover the surface.
For a final flourish, melt the chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water. Let cool, then drizzle over the top.
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