Cake Glossary: A Glossary Of The Different Cake Types

Page 8: Cake Glossary T To Z

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The Tatin sisters, Caroline and Stéphanie, owned the Hotel Tatin in Lamotte-Beuvron, southwest of Paris in the Loire Valley, not far from the town of Chambord.

A tired Stéphanie, preparing an apple tart, accidently left the apples
cooking in sugar and butter for too long on the stove top. In an attempt to salvage the
dessert, she placed the pastry atop the apples in the skillet and baked it
in the oven.

The tart came out of the oven with the apples deeply caramelized. Customers loved it and the Tarte Tatin was born.

It is now also made with different fruits: banana, peach, pear, stone fruit, the apple-like quince; and with trends such as salted caramel.

Here’s a recipe for Quince Tarte Tatin.

Savory versions are also made, such as beet or onion tatin. Here"™s a recipe for beet tarte tatin.
 

Top: Conventional Tarte Tatin .Here"™s the recipe from Martha Stewart. Bottom: Tarte Tatin cut from a sheet pan. Photo courtesy Chocolate Lab | San Francisco.

The commonality is that the tea cakes are finger food. They range from miniature loaf cakes to raisin buns to a Mallomar-type cookie (in Northern Ireland) to a sugar cookie (in the southern U.S.) to the Victoria sponge (jam and whipped cream sandwiched between two sponge cakes) enjoyed by Queen Victoria with her tea.
 

See our review of Euforia Confections’ thousand layer cake. For other many-layered cakes see Mille Crêpe and Smith Island Cake.
 

It is sometimes called an Italian trifle, although it is much lighter than a traditional trifle.

• Cherry Tiramisu Recipe
• Frozen Pumpkin Tiramisu Recipe
• Pandoro Tiramisu Recipe
• Tiramisu Sundae Recipe

Tortes are made without chemical leaveners, using egg foams for lightness. In addition to the fillings traditionally used by American, British and French cakes, tortes also use marzipan (ground almond paste) as a filling.

But essentially, torte is the German word for cake. As opposed to a pound cake or a more casual cake, a torte denotes a rich, dense cake made with many eggs and little or no flour, using ground nuts (and sometimes breadcrumbs) for texture.

Tortes are also are shorter and wider—often no more than 2-1/2 inches high, and 10 to 12 inches in diameter—the original style.

Today, many bakers and recipe writers call their cakes “tortes,” possibly in order to make them sound different and more exciting. More accurately, in the U.S. the term should be used to describe a shorter, wider cake.

Tres leches cake most likely originated in Nicaragua in the early 1900s. The recipe was printed on the label of sweetened condensed milk cans to spur sales of the product.
 

Tres leches cake. Photo courtesy Betty Crocker.

Today’s elaborate trifles—which are hardly trifling—began as more humble desserts many centuries ago in England, and began to evolve to their current fancy state in the mid-18th century.

A Bundt pan, which also has a hole in the center, isn’t a substitute for the same effect, because it is made to create a shorter, dense cake, and the fluted sides can make releasing the cake more difficult.
 

Adding a circle of Pillsbury Double Dutch Frosting Mix on top of the batter, halfway through, created a moist circle of "œfudge" in the center of the cake. Bundt pan sales jumped exponentially, and like other recipes, Tunnel Of Fudge became all the rage.

The frosting mix was discontinued, and subsequent recipes were re-worked with cocoa powder and later, chocolate pudding mix. The first prize winner? Golden Gate Snack Bread, a yeast bread made with instant flour, processed cheese spread, dry onion soup mix and butter.

As the recipe evolved, cooks put their skillets in the oven to bake. Nordicware, creator of the bundt pan, created a special round pan with indentations for the pineapple slices, guaranteeing an even presentation. Upside Down Cake is related to the Tarte Tatin, an accidental upside-down pie from 1880s France.

Check out these upside down cake recipes…and an upside-down pie:

• Blood Orange Upside Down Cake
• Upside-Down Ginger-Pecan Peach Pie

  Read more at: /reviews/main/cookies/pastry/peach-pie
  Upside-Down Ginger-Pecan Peach Pie

  Read more at: /reviews/main/cookies/pastry/peach-pie
  Ginger Pecan Peach Upside Down Pie

• Upside Down Irish Whiskey Cake

  Read more at: /blog/2014/03/08/recipe-upside-down-irish-whiskey-cake/
  Irish Whiskey Upside Down Cake

Also see Tarte Tatin, above: an upside-down tart.
 

However, credit for creating the tradition of tea is owed to Anna, Duchess of Bedford (1788-1861), one of Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. There was a big stretch between lunch at noon and dinner at eight, and the duchess became famished at about four in the afternoon.
At first, she had a pot of tea and a few breadstuffs brought to her dressing room. But later, she invited friends to join her for a late afternoon meal of small cakes (which became known as tea cakes), bread and butter sandwiches, assorted sweets, and a formal tea service. The practice of inviting friends to come for afternoon tea was quickly picked up by other social hostesses, including Queen Victoria.
 

You can see the striations, or layers, of pastry when you look at the top of the Viennoiserie or when you cut into them, and you can pull apart the layers of the baked dough.

According to legend (subsequently disproved), the croissant was created to commemorate the defeat of the Turks in Vienna; hence, the group of specialty breads became known as Viennoiserie. See croissant in our Bread Glossary for the accurate history.

As can be seen on the Food Network, those who can afford designer cakes can have majestic works of art that don’t look like wedding cakes, but are cake sculptures that represent anything from where the bride and groom met (an art exhibit at a museum) to their hobby (flying planes or scuba diving) to a fantasy of a princess being rescued from the tower by a prince on horseback.
 

By the mid-eighteenth century, the discovery of beaten eggs as a raising agent led to much more elaborate baking, and the more primitive yeast cakes fell out of favor. The beaten batter was poured into molds as simple as tin hoops set on parchment paper on a cookie sheet (from which modern cake pans developed).

*In 1859, Louis Pasteur identified that yeast was a living organism and the agent responsible for alcoholic fermentation and dough leavening. He discocovered that yeast feeds on the starches in flour, producing carbon dioxidel the carbon dioxide expands the gluten proteins in the flour; and the gluten proteins cause the dough to expand and rise. Nine years later, Fleischmann’s Yeast was founded, and the modern baking era, with commercially-available yeast, was born.

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