Home › Desserts-Puddings › Blitz Torte
Blitz Torte
14 C milk 14 C butter 1/2 C sugar Yolks 4 eggs 1 C flour Whites 4 eggs 2 t baking powder 1 t vanilla Pinch salt ¾ C sugar Cream butter and sugar, add egg yolks and vanilla. Mix flour and baking powder, add to first mixture alternately with the milk. Spread into two shallow pans, cover with beaten whites of the eggs with ¾ C sugar. Sprinkle with nut meats, bake in a moderate oven 1/2 hour. 1 C scalded milk 14 C sugar Custard Filling 1 T cornstarch 1 egg Mix cornstarch and sugar, add egg beaten. Pour gradually on hot milk until thickened. Flavor with orange or vanilla. Christina D. Kern.
Note: Mrs. H. L. Titus uses 1/2 C butter, 5 T water and 1 C sugar with egg whites. 1/2 C butter ¾ C sugar 1½ C flour Yolks 4 eggs
A two-layer cake baked with its meringue on top, then filled with a stovetop custard. The typed fractions have suffered in transcription — read "14 C" as 1/4 cup and "34 C" as 3/4 cup throughout.
- The hingeThe meringue goes onto the raw batter and bakes with it, so it must be beaten to firm, glossy peaks with the 3/4 cup sugar fully dissolved before spreading. A slack meringue weeps into the crumb and never crisps.
- Oven"Moderate" is usually read as about 350-375F. Half an hour is right for shallow layers; the meringue should be pale gold and dry to a light touch.
- Pans"Two shallow pans" probably means two round layer pans, 8 or 9 inches; no size is given. Grease and line the bottoms - the meringue makes the cakes awkward to turn out, so cool them in the pans and lift them free with parchment.
- The cake batter1/4 cup butter, 1/2 cup sugar, 4 yolks, 1 cup flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/4 cup milk. It is a stiff, small quantity of batter; spread it thin and level before the meringue goes on.
- Nut meatsThe kind and quantity are unspecified; chopped almonds or walnuts scattered over the meringue suit it. Sliced almonds toast more evenly in the half hour than coarse pieces.
- Custard filling1 cup scalded milk, 1/4 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon cornstarch, 1 egg. Combine sugar and cornstarch, whisk in the beaten egg, temper with the hot milk, then return to the pan and cook, stirring, until it thickens and the starch loses its raw taste — a minute or two at a bare simmer. Chill before using.
- AssemblyStack meringue side up, custard between, and fill no more than an hour or two before serving. The meringue softens as it sits.
- The trailing listsThe note from Mrs. Titus (1/2 cup butter, 5 tablespoons water, 1 cup sugar with the whites) and the stray column at the end (1/2 cup butter, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 1/2 cups flour, 4 yolks) are not extra ingredients for the recipe above; they appear to belong to a variation, though the transcription is too broken to be sure how they fit together.
- YieldOne 8- or 9-inch two-layer torte, eight to ten servings.
Blitz Torte — German for "lightning cake" — is said to have earned its name because it goes together with far less work than a proper layered Torte, the meringue and nuts baking on in a single step instead of being made separately. It belongs to the German-American baking that runs through Midwestern church cookbooks, where congregational fundraising books like this one preserved such recipes under their German names long after the families cooking them spoke only English. The two-contributor format here, with Mrs. Titus's variation appended to Mrs. Kern's version, is characteristic of these volumes.