Esterházy Cake: A Gluten Free Option

There are two ways a cake ends up gluten free. One is that somebody took a recipe built on wheat flour and replaced it with a blend of rice flour, tapioca starch, xanthan gum and whatever else the formulation required. The other is that the recipe never had flour in it.

The second produces better cake, and Esterházy is the clearest example of it.

The problem with substitution

Wheat flour does two jobs in a cake. It provides bulk, and it provides gluten, which is the protein network that traps air and gives a sponge its structure and its chew.

Take the flour out and you can replace the bulk easily enough. Replacing the structure is much harder, which is why gluten free baking leans on gums and starches. These work, in the sense that the cake holds together. They also tend to produce a crumb that is either slightly gritty or slightly gummy, and a cake that goes stale noticeably faster.

Anyone who has spent years eating gluten free cake knows the texture immediately. Usually so does everybody else at the table, which is the part that gets tiring.

Esterházy CakeEsterházy cake, 18 cm and gluten free. Almond meringue layers with buttercream and the traditional feathered icing.£76Order this

What Esterházy does instead

It has no flour and never did.

The layers are ground almonds and whipped egg white. Egg white whipped to a meringue provides the structure that gluten would otherwise provide, and the ground almonds provide the bulk and the flavour. Nothing is being substituted, because nothing is missing.

Five discs are baked slowly until they are dry the whole way through, then layered with buttercream. The top is glazed white and combed by hand into the feathered chevron pattern the cake is known for. That pattern is drawn with chocolate through wet icing and has to be finished in one pass, because the moment the icing starts to set it drags.

The result is rich, nutty and quite sweet, with layers that are firm at the edge and softer in the middle where the buttercream has worked into them.

Where it comes from

Hungarian, from the late nineteenth century, and named after Prince Paul III Anton Esterházy, a member of one of the great Habsburg families. It was created in Budapest and spread quickly through Vienna and the rest of the empire, which is why it turns up under slightly different forms across Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and beyond.

The version with a strict five layers and the feathered top is the Hungarian one. Austrian versions are often a little different. Nobody in either country would call the other wrong out loud.

Its gluten free status is entirely accidental. It was designed around almonds because almonds were what a Habsburg pastry kitchen used for a cake of this sort, and the fact that it now solves a modern dietary problem is a happy coincidence rather than a design goal.

Why it matters at a table

The practical value of a naturally gluten free cake is social rather than culinary.

The usual arrangement is one cake for everybody and one small separate thing for the person who cannot eat gluten. That person eats their separate thing while everybody else eats cake, and they say it is lovely, and everybody moves on. It is fine and it is also a small, repeated reminder of being catered for rather than included.

With an Esterházy there is one cake, everybody eats it, and unless somebody announces it nobody works out that it is the free from option. We have had several orders where the person it was bought for was not told until after they had had a slice.

That is a better outcome than any amount of clever substitution.

What to check before ordering

It contains almonds, so it does not work for a nut allergy. This is the one thing that catches people out, because gluten free and nut free are often requested together and this cake solves exactly one of them.

It contains eggs and milk, so it is not dairy free and not vegan.

It is not made in a dedicated gluten free facility. We are a small bakery and wheat flour is used in the same kitchen for everything else we make. For somebody with coeliac disease this matters, and we would rather say so plainly than let anyone assume otherwise. If cross contamination is a medical issue rather than a preference, please ask us before ordering and we will tell you honestly what we can and cannot control.

The other flour free option

The pavlova at £72 is also made without flour. Crisp meringue shell, soft marshmallow centre, cream and fresh berries.

It is much lighter than the Esterházy, which makes it the better choice after a large meal, and it contains no nuts, which makes it the answer when both gluten and nuts are a problem.

Its drawback is that it does not keep. Once cream meets meringue a clock starts, and it is at its best within a few hours of arriving. The Esterházy will happily last several days.

Serving it

Take it out of the fridge half an hour before you cut it. This matters more for the Esterházy than for anything else we make, because cold buttercream is firm and mutes almost all of the flavour, and warmed slightly it becomes a different and much better cake.

Cut it with a sharp knife pressed straight down. The meringue layers will crack if you drag the blade, and while it still tastes the same, the slice arrives on the plate in pieces.

It keeps for four or five days in the fridge, which is longer than most of what we make. The layers gradually soften against the buttercream over that time, so a slice on day three is noticeably more tender than one on day one. Both are good and people tend to have a preference.

Sold outPavlova Cake£72Kyiv Cake (18 cm)£84

Ordering

Esterházy is 18 cm, serves ten to twelve, and costs £75. It needs 48 hours notice like everything else.

Delivery is £12 within SW3 and £15 across the rest of London and Surrey, which covers all London postcodes and much of Surrey, Kent and the Home Counties. There is a £50 minimum on orders.

If you are ordering for a group with several dietary requirements, send us the list rather than working through the product pages. It is quicker for both of us and we will tell you straight away what works and what does not.