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Central Europe · Volume 39, The Vinegar Cure, the Seven Herbs and the Butter Letter

Dresdner Eierschecke

Dresden

Dresdner Eierschecke, a three layer cake of yeast base, quark and a mottled gold custard top: a square slice of cake on a plate showing three clear layers, a thin pale yeast base, a thick white quark middle and a wobbly yellow custard top set to a mottled gold brown.

Illustration

The Saxon cake, whose name is the mottling, the Schecke, of its top. The recipe below is the Saxony tourism board's, with its quantities and its bake; it is a regional board's home recipe and not a baker's, and no source ties the cake to Dresden's baking guilds. A base free version from the GDR years exists on the recipe sites.

As tradition built it

Makes one cake, about 12 slices. The dough rises and the custard goes cold before the cake is built.

Ingredients

For the base

  • 170g plain flour
  • 7g dried yeast, or half a 42g cube of fresh
  • 60ml lukewarm milk
  • 30g soft butter
  • 30g sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 pinch salt

For the quark layer

  • 500g low fat quark
  • 1 packet vanilla pudding powder
  • 100g sugar
  • 100g soft butter
  • 2 eggs, medium
  • ½ lemon, the zest

For the top

  • 400ml milk
  • 1 packet vanilla pudding powder
  • 100g soft butter
  • 100g icing sugar
  • 4 eggs, separated
  • 1 pinch salt

Method

  1. Make the base: dissolve the yeast in the lukewarm milk, work it with the flour, butter, sugar, egg and salt into a soft dough, and let it rise, covered, until doubled.
  2. Cook the top's pudding first so it can cool: whisk the pudding powder into a little of the 400ml of milk, bring the rest to the boil, stir in the paste, cook it to a thick custard, and leave it to go cold under a cloth.
  3. Beat the quark layer together: the quark, its pudding powder, the sugar, the soft butter, the two eggs and the lemon zest, to a smooth cream.
  4. Press the risen dough out over the base of a greased tin and spread the quark cream over it.
  5. Beat the cold pudding with the soft butter, the icing sugar and the four yolks until smooth. Whisk the whites with the pinch of salt to soft peaks and fold them in.
  6. Spread the top over the quark layer and bake at 165 degrees fan for about 1 hour, until the top is set and mottled gold. Cool it in the tin before cutting.

What a modern chef changes

The custard made from scratch, the three layers kept distinct

Rung 6

Method

  1. Replace the pudding powder with a crème pâtissière set on cornflour and real vanilla, 40 grams of cornflour to the 400 millilitres; the packet is the tradition since the GDR and the pod is older than the packet.
  2. Bake it low, 150 degrees, for longer, until a probe in the custard reads 82; the mottling comes from the whites rising and setting, and a hot oven browns it before the quark layer has set.
  3. Chill it overnight; the cake is better cold and cut with a hot knife.
  4. Use a quark at 20 per cent fat if the low fat one is wet; drain it an hour in cloth either way.
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