May 29th and May 31st, 2024
As much as I will never forget what I saw and learnt in Poland, I will also never forget the cake that I ate from a bakery very close to the hotel we were staying at. I think this food memory has lingered for all the reasons that researchers have pointed to- it was novel, there was emotion involved, and it was made in good company. When we arrived in Krakow (on a Monday) our group walked past a delicious-looking bakery called Ciastkarnia Vanilla, and I made note of it to make sure that I had a chance to investigate it further. A few days later, before the events of the day had started, my roommate and I decided that at the end of the day rather than get a traditional dinner, we would instead stop at this bakery and have cake.
On Wednesday, May 29th we spent the morning at the Jagiellonian University and then toured the Galicia Jewish Museum with Professor Jonathan Webber in the afternoon. After we had finished for the day, we walked to the bakery where we looked at all the cakes that were on offer and were bamboozled by all the Polish names that they were called. There were so many different options that we quickly realized it was going to be almost impossible to decide which cake to try. That’s when I made the executive decision to get two pieces of cake- it was supposed to be dinner after all, right? I was very sure I had made the right decision as soon as the woman behind the cash register had sliced my pieces of cake and I was sitting at a table with them in front of me. My roommate shortly joined me with her two pieces of cake, and we began to enjoy.
Soon after that, a group of Field School students saw us and asked us what we were doing with two pieces of cake. We told them, and they quickly decided to head into the bakery for their own cake and join us. After that, the bakery became not only a place of comfort after a long day, but also a place that brought people together and allowed us to revel in the simplicity and otherworldliness of a delicious piece of Polish cake. After being immersed in such intense material on each of the days that we went to the bakery, this nod to the simpler things in life really made an impact on not only our ability to cope, but also created food memories that we’ll have for a very long time.
Why I Chose This Recipe:
My baking skills are not quite up to the level of the bakers who must have made the Polish cakes that we tried and while I took pictures, I don’t think I could even start to fathom all the ingredients and steps that went into them. There were flavours, textures, and combinations that I had never tried before, and I didn’t know where I would even start in their recreation. After much research of more simplistic Polish cake recipes, I stumbled across this one which seemed perfect as it is a traditional Polish cake, but also seemed more accessible from a baking standpoint. It’s a Polish apple cake called Szarlotka and is kind of like a Polish version of apple pie. I used a BBC Good Food recipe after researching many and discovering that they’re all fairly similar.