EXAMS ARE OVER!
I made a cake not to celebrate this fact, but rather to procrastinate studying for my last exam. Haha whoops
I dated a Peruvian guy for a while, and through him learned about the glory that is Peruvian food. People always think of countries like France when asked about the best places in the world for eating, but from what I've heard and tasted, Peru is 'da bomb. Peruvians have a whole holiday dedicated to eating roast chicken (Día Nacional del Pollo a la Brasa - Look it up, I'm not even kidding), and have some wicked awesome pastries.
My ex's mother is an excellent chef, and one day she sent over a tupperware container with a large slice of cake, the likes of which I had never seen before. It was absolutely heavenly. After being given the recipe months and months ago, I finally decided to give it a shot yesterday. Mine isn't nearly as beautiful as the first one I tried, but oh well, it tastes great!
The secret to the cake is anise, a spice that tastes a lot like licorice. For this recipe, it's toasted in the oven, then ground up before being added to the dough.
The dough is shaped into long rods, then baked in the oven until golden. They're then stacked on top of each other in layers, and drenched with syrup.
The syrup (honey) is made by first simmering water with some fruit and spices, then adding a lot of sugar and boiling the heck out of it until very sticky and quite thick. I didn't boil mine quite long enough, so it was too thin to stay on top of the cake. Lesson learned!
Since I don't have permission to reveal the possibly top secret recipe I was given for this cake, here's a link to a website with a pretty similar recipe (and a cool post about its history!).
Happy new semester!
E
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