Legends Of Cake Making

........................Perhaps the renaissance of cake making came in 1533 when Catherine de Medici married King Henry II of France. Faced with permanent residence in France, she brought along with her Italian delights in kitchens of their adopted home and introducing a host of culinary novelties to French such as choux pastry. The French, swift learners that they were, picked up the finer point of pastry making from their Italian teachers and went on to create a whole new game of cakes and pastries. In 1638, Ragueneau invented the almond tartlets that were later immortalized in print in Rostand's " Cyrano de Bergerac". This year 1740 saw the alleged introduction of the rum baba to France by the polish King, Stanislas leczcsynski, during his exile in Lorraine. Finding the traditional Gugelhopf, a yeast cake, too dry, he soaked it rum and named it after his favourite character, Ali Baba. The French Julien brothers played around with this recipe and in 1850, they succeeded in creating an improved version of this cake, which they named after French gastronome, Brillat Savarin, who gave them the secret recipe for the soaking syrup; thus was the French savarin cake born. The cake's place in history was sealed when Marie-Antoinette, just prior to the French Revolution in 1790, declared with great seriousness, upon being told that peasants were starving for lack of bread, "Let them eat cake". Ironically, they chose to do just that, deposing the King and Queen and taking what had formerly been the tea time fancies of the French monarchy. The 18 and 19 centuries saw the blooming of the patisseries art; this was the time of the reign of the undisputed king of patisseries, Antonin Careme, chef to a plethora of royal kitchens, architect of amazing sculptural desserts and allegedly, the inventor of croquemboche (a variant of choux pastry) and meringue.

Then came the discovery of chocolate. The cake forged a new path for itself with chocolate at its side, tearing throught the European continent and the Americas with devastating speed and leaving behind, awed, dazed fans and hundreds of delicious products such as the American Chocolate Fudge Cake and the Brownie, the Austrian Sacher Torte and the German Black Forest Cake.