Cake of love

I have a recipe for a dessert called the Persian Love Cake. It’s not something you would find on a Persian table, but rather, it takes its cues from Persian cuisine: cardamom, rose water and pistachio lend their delicate flavors. It’s very showy, not too sweet, and extremely romantic, covered in candied rose petals and yielding in your mouth. I’ve made it for dear friends and anniversaries over the years, but this time, I’m making it for two friends who recently married. What makes it special is that they didn’t have the right to marry in the States, so they moved back to Switzerland (they’re a culturally ‘mixed’ couple like me and Darling Husband) where they chose to marry on Valentine’s day. I think a celebration is in order.

Candied rose petals
1 large egg white
¼ cup superfine sugar
Petals from 1 organic rose

The challenge of making this cake is not in the kitchen, it’s in sourcing the ingredients. I decided to make a half-cake, since Easter and lots of chocolate eggs are around the corner. The recipe starts with the garnish: candied covered rose petals. In the past, I have picked fragrant summer roses from the gardens of friends whom I know do not spray, or, in the dead of winter, have resorted to using salad flowers purchased at the co-op. Here, my fall-back plan was purchased marzipan roses and/or pansies. But I found pale pink Duftrosen, and I’ve purchased superfine sugar and free range eggs to candy them. The sugar hunt was an adventure, with many types vying for my attention: The everyday sugar used by German Hausfrauen is rather course, fine for everyday baking and sweetening coffee, but woefully inadequate for delicate rose petals. Powdered sugar is also represented, along with cubes (double-sized; if you want one lump, you have to break it in half), brown sugar, fruit sugar (as opposed to beet sugar), and jelling sugar, with added pectin. There’s also the Zuckerhut, or sugar hat, a cone of pressed sugar that features in a holiday specialty where hot rum punch is poured over the cone (I’m not really clear on this, but understand it’s a tradition not to be messed with).

Cake
½ cup cake flour
7 tablespoons baker's sugar or superfine sugar, divided
¾ teaspoons baking powder
pinch coarse kosher salt
2 large eggs, separated
4 tablespoons water
1/8 cup canola oil
½ teaspoon grated lemon peel
¼ teaspoon whole cardamom seeds (removed from about 5 green cardamom pods)

Flour in most of Europe is Type 405, a bit finer grind, with less gluten than we’re used to, but it will work fine, since there’s no separate flour used for pastry here. Baking powder in the US and the UK is what we call double-acting, and contains two leavening agents. I could go down to the pharmacy and ask for Natrium Karbonate (sodium bicarbonate) to rev up the German packet of Bakpulver, but I know from experience that this single-acting powder works well with Type 405. (There was actually a little jar of “household soda” in the baking section of the supermarket, but since they don’t list the ingredients, I’ll stick with the regular stuff, I’ll just use a wee bit more than usual.) Going down the list, everything else poses no problem whatsoever, until I get to the cardamom. Anticipating a problem, I picked up ground cardamom during my shopping spree in France earlier this week. The natural food store here in Ravensburg actually did have some, but nary a full pod of cardamom is to be seen anywhere in this burg.

Frosting
2 1/2 cups chilled heavy whipping cream, divided
Pinch of saffron threads
2/3 cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon rose water

German whipping cream is barely thick enough to whip, but I found some organic cream at the tiny cut-rate grocery store down the street, and it should hold together. I’m also tempted by a soy product from SoyaToo that consists of a tiny aseptic package of soy milk thickened with algae that’s supposed to whip up like cream. I think I’ll stick with cow’s cream for now, though. Saffron was missing from the shelves of Kaufland, but the natural grocery in town had a packet of saffron threads from India. These will be infused into the cream, which, once whipped a bit, receives some powdered sugar to sweeten it and rose water to augment the petals decorating the cake. I was expecting to find the rose water in France, but I found nothing like it there; it was the natural food store here in Ravensburg, tiny hole-in-the-wall that it is, that gave me a precious bottle—not only rose water, but from organic roses to boot.

Garnish
2 tablespoons natural unsalted pistachios

The green nuts set off the pink rose petals nicely, but they prove quite elusive. Finally, a tiny packet beckons from a Kaufland shelf. I don’t usually pay huge attention to price, but 100 grams of green pistachios from Israel set me back nearly three Euro—close to four dollars.

Our apartment has everything I need, except a mixer, but my accommodating Mother-in-law produces her backup hand mixer that I may borrow. The oven here on the farm even offers me a convection setting, so, we’re ready to bake. I’ll pop the finished cake in the fridge, awaiting the arrival of good friends. We’re hoping for a weekend of enjoying each other’s company, making a dent in all those bottles of French wine, and finding lots of chocolate eggs.