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03/15/2000 Archived Entry: "My Family's Passover Walnut Cake"

Do you know the old joke about Jewish holidays? They are always late or early, never on time.

Well, it’s not exactly a joke. Because Jewish holidays occur according to the Jewish lunar calendar, which does not coincide with the internationally accepted Gregorian solar calendar, or even with the Chinese lunar calendar, they do not happen on the same dates every year.

This year, for instance, Passover is late. The first seder, which is to say the first night of the week-long holiday, is on Wednesday, April 19. (Roman Catholic and Protestant Easter, by the way, is April 23, the Sunday of Passover week.) So it seems a little bit early to be getting Passover recipe requests. But I am. I’m especially getting requests for my family’s walnut sponge cake, with which everyone seems to have a great success.

Yesterday, Carole Walter was on my radio program. She is a well-known baking and cooking teacher and cookbook author (Great Cakes and Great Pies and Tarts). She’s giving a Passover baking class soon and mentioned a technique for sponge cakes that I did not know about, but that applies to my grandmother’s walnut cake. Carole says that you can make a sponge cake more stable if you beat some sugar into the egg whites, instead of beating them without any sugar, as my grandmother always did. Just take some of the sugar from the rest of the recipe and allocate it to the whites. Elsie Sonkin (that’s my grandmother) always made us tip-toe around when one of these cakes was in the oven. Slamming a door or stomping around, she thought, made her cake fall. It was such an unpredictable recipe. It was rare for it to be a complete disaster, a pancake, but it often fell somewhat. Not that that stopped us from enjoying its marvelously nutty flavor.

Given Carole’s instruction, I will, this year, try preparing the cake a little differently. I am going to take half the sugar in the recipe (1/2 cup) and gradually beat it into the egg whites – a tablespoon or so at a time -- after they begin foaming. Let’s see what happens.


My Family's Passover Walnut Cake

9 eggs, separated
1 cup sugar
2 tablespoons matzoh cake meal, plus some extra for the pan
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 cups shelled walnuts, finely ground, preferably in a rotary nut grater

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

With matzoh cake meal, dust a 10-inch tube pan with a removable bottom.

Beat the egg yolks until foamy.

Beat in the sugar, 2 tablespoons at a time, beating well after each addition.

Beat in the cake meal, and stir in the vanilla and salt. Blend thoroughly.

Stir in the walnuts.

Beat the egg whites until stiff but not dry and fold them gently into the batter.

Turn the batter into the prepared pan and smooth out the top.

Bake for about 45 to 50 minutes, or until the cake shrinks away from the sides of the pan.

Turn pan upside down and, if it does not have legs to stand on, place it over the neck of a bottle to cool. When cool, run a knife around the edges of the cake and around the tube, and turn the cake onto a cake platter.

(By the way, Carole does not recommend this upside down method. Using a pan with a removable bottom, it’s enough to let the cake cook a few minutes, run a knife around the sides, then remove the cake from the pan and let it cool completely before removing the cake from the tube pan’s bottom.)