Let them eat cake!

By Rita Erlich
April 26, 2005
Family favourite: a cheesecake-like potato cake.

Family favourite: a cheesecake-like potato cake.
Photo: Estelle Grunberg

There's no need to miss out on delicious baked foods at a time when flour is forbidden.

Cake is a serious business during Passover - especially since flour is forbidden.

Passover is the eight-day Jewish festival that celebrates the exodus from Egypt, and the redemption from slavery to freedom that is described in the book of Exodus. At Passover, extended families come together around the festive table (extended, usually, to seat 20 people or more) for the Seder, which is held on the first and second nights of holiday (and sometimes on the last two). The Seder (the word means "order" in Hebrew) follows an order of service, including the reading aloud of the ancient text of the Haggadah, and a large meal composed of symbolic and traditional foods.

What makes Passover cooking different from that of other festivals is that yeast and leavening agents are forbidden, in memory of the unrisen bread that the ancient Hebrews took with them on their flight from Egypt. Instead of bread, there is matzah, an unleavened bread that can be coarsely or finely ground and used instead of flour.

This year, Passover began on April 23 (of the Gregorian calendar - in the Hebrew calendar, it always begins on the 15th day of the month of Nissan, with the first Seder held on the previous evening).

Eggs are among the symbolic foods eaten at Passover. They are served hard-boiled early in the Seder meal. They are also used for the making of gefilte fish (minced fish used to make fish cutlets or to stuff a whole fish), and in great quantities for the making of cake.

There is - so far as we know - no ritual purpose for cake. But cake is essential during Passover.

Constraints are often a precursor for creativity. The form of the sonata did not inhibit Beethoven, nor did the rigour of the sonnet form stifle Shakespeare. And the absence of flour and leaven leads in the Jewish kitchen to a flurry of wonderful baked goods. Perhaps Marie Antoinette was really Jewish: "No bread? Let them eat cake."

Passover cakes are notably delicious. It may be that all the ingredients are particularly good, produced especially for the eight-day festival: special chocolate, fresh butter, newly bought nuts and more eggs than you can shake a Heart Foundation tick at.

Cake is a practical matter at festive times. People visit, people must be fed. Where there is tea and coffee, there must be cake. Most of them are sponges, with walnuts or almonds or hazelnuts, with or without orange rind.

Two cakes are family favourites. One, a chocolate nut cake, is my adaptation of a recipe from a long-out-of-print US book called simply Jewish Cookbook, by Mildred Grosberg Bellin, which was given to our mother some time in the 1950s.

Every Passover, we all say: "This cake is delicious. Why don't we make it throughout the year?"

The answer, I think, is that it never looks gorgeous. It often sinks unevenly. In a crisis, dust it liberally with icing sugar, or decorate it with chocolate curls.

Since I have been making it,

I have modified the recipe

slightly, using more chocolate and adding ground hazelnuts to the ground blanched almonds of the original.

The second is a powerful remembrance of cakes past. My late mother used to tell me about a cake she remembered from her childhood in Poland. One day she came home from an afternoon tea, in some excitement. "I tasted the cake again!" she said. "And I've got the recipe."

It is made, improbably, with mashed potatoes, and tastes rather like a baked cheesecake. It must have been a cake for Passover, since it contains no flour at all, but my mother recollected only the flavour of it. It would have been 50 years since she had last eaten it.

Betty Erlich's potato cake


220g cooked potatoes

4 eggs, separated

45g blanched ground almonds

1 lemon (grated peel and juice)

160g castor sugar


- Preheat oven to 175C.

- Mash the potatoes thoroughly while they are still warm. Use a potato ricer, if possible, because there must be no lumps at all. Allow to cool.

- Mix in egg yolks, ground almonds, lemon juice and grated lemon peel. Beat the egg whites until nearly stiff, then add the castor sugar and beat again. Fold beaten egg whites into the potato mixture. Pour into lightly buttered, 19cm-20cm round or square cake tin, and bake for about 40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the centre of the cake comes out dry.

Chocolate nut cake

Matzah meal is available in stores selling kosher food. It comes fine or coarsely ground; I prefer fine-ground for this. Grating chocolate can be tricky. I use the food processor, which leaves the chocolate slightly uneven, but that's fine. I use a blender to grind the nuts, since they must be fine.


8 (60g) eggs, separated

180g pure icing sugar, sifted

grated rind of one orange

90g dark chocolate, grated

75ml orange juice

1 tbsp sweet wine (Rutherglen muscat or tokay does nicely)

50g roasted hazelnuts, ground

75g blanched almonds, ground

70g fine matzah meal

2 level tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground mixed spice


- Preheat oven to 170C.

- Beat egg yolks and icing sugar together until thick and pale, then fold in grated orange rind, chocolate, orange juice, wine and nuts. Stir matzah meal and spices together, then fold into mixture. Beat egg whites until stiff, and fold them, a quarter at a time, into the cake mixture.

- Pour into a greased, 25-26cm springform tin, and bake about 45 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the centre of the cake comes out dry. Allow to rest a few minutes before inverting tin.


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