It's a cake fit for a princess.
In my family the celebration cakes of choice were elegant, restrained, fruit-filled sponges from a Chinese bakery. As a child I hated them. They were ethereal and airy, barely sweet, and frosted only with a light whipped cream. To my Americanized palate, they were more fruit salad than dessert. What I craved were tooth-achingly sweetcupcakes with swirls of dense buttercream, confetti cakes with frosting from the tub, and domed rosette-covered cakes with a whole damn Barbie sticking out of them.
But sometimes, if it was my mom’s turn to bring the cake, I’d get lucky. She’d stop by Schubert’s Bakery in the Richmond or Ambrosia Bakery in the Sunset and pick up a princess cake. Underneath the perfectly smooth lurid green marzipan dome, there’d be three layers of genoise striped with raspberry jam and pastry cream, all slathered with a healthy coating of whipped cream.
The princesses in question are Margaretha, Märtha, and Astrid of Sweden. Born around the turn of the 20th century, they attended a Stockholm home economics school run by Jenny Åkerström, who, in 1929, published a four-volume cookbook titledThe 1948 edition contains the first known recipe for grön tårta, or green cake—an alleged favorite of the young royals, which explains why it’s most commonly known as prinsesstårta.
Although princess cake hails from Sweden, it’s iconically San Franciscan, found at bakeries across the city. Would-be prospectors from Scandinavia first arrived in the Bay Area during the Gold Rush, and immigration boomed during the first decade of the 20th century, with SF’s Swedish population nearly doubling between 1900 and 1910.
I miss these cakes—they’re as hard-to-find in New York as they are ubiquitous in San Francisco—and every time an occasion rolls around, I toy with the idea of making one from scratch. If you want to try your hand at baking one of your own, know that you’re in for a
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