Kyiv Cake in London: A Guide to Kyivskyi Tort

Ask somebody who grew up in Kyiv to describe Kyivskyi tort and they will not start with the flavour. They will start with the sound it makes. A good Kyiv cake gives way under the fork with a soft crunch that fades into cream rather than snapping, and that single quality is the whole cake. Everything in the recipe exists to produce it, and every bad version has failed at it in one of two ways.

It is also, without much competition, the most famous cake to come out of Ukraine, and one of the very few Soviet confectionery products that people still argue about by name seventy years later.

Where it came from

The cake was made for the first time in 1956, at the Karl Marx confectionery factory in Kyiv. The story told inside the factory, and repeated so often that it has taken on the shape of a fable, is that a batch of egg whites was left out of the cold store overnight by mistake. The next morning they had changed: looser, slacker, no longer good for the job they had been whipped for. Rather than throw them away, somebody whisked them with sugar and nuts and baked them into discs.

Whether the accident happened as neatly as that is anyone's guess. What is not in doubt is that aged egg whites make better meringue for this purpose, that professional bakers had known it long before 1956, and that the factory turned the result into a product so successful that it became a form of currency. A Kyiv cake in a box was what you carried when you were travelling from Kyiv to Moscow and wanted to arrive as somebody worth knowing.

What is actually in it

Two discs of nut meringue, a buttercream between and around them, chocolate, and a coating of crumbs on the sides.

The meringue is the part that matters. Whites are whipped with sugar to a stiff, glossy foam, then chopped nuts and a small amount of flour are folded through, and the mixture is spread into rings and dried in a low oven for a long time rather than baked quickly in a hot one. The original used cashews. Hazelnut is what most bakeries use now, ours included, because a hazelnut roasts to a deeper flavour and holds it against buttercream, which is a strong thing to be held against.

The nuts are not a garnish. A plain meringue disc would go to dust under a fork or turn to toffee against cream within hours. The nuts break the meringue structure up, give it something to crumble along, and stop it either shattering or dissolving.

The cream is a Charlotte: egg yolks and milk cooked to a custard, cooled, then beaten into soft butter. Part of it is left plain and vanilla scented, part is worked with cocoa. The plain cream goes between and on top, the chocolate cream is what the sides and the piping are made of. It is a cream that belongs to a particular era of baking, rich and stable and not at all light, and there is no honest way to make this cake with whipped double cream instead.

Why the ageing matters

Fresh egg white is tight. It holds a great deal of air quickly and then loses some of it again, and meringue made from it tends to bake up crisp and brittle all the way through.

White that has been left for a day loosens. The protein relaxes, the foam it makes is slacker and slower to build but far more stable once built, and it dries into something with a little give in it rather than a sheet of sugar glass. That is the softness under the crunch, and it is the reason this cake cannot be made in an afternoon by somebody who has decided that morning to make it.

Kyiv Cake (18 cm)Kyiv cake, also spelled Kiev cake. Hazelnut meringue layers, buttercream and chocolate, 18 cm.£84Order this

How to tell a good one

Look at the side of a slice first. You should see two clear meringue layers, each visibly full of nuts, with cream between them. If the layers have gone pale and dense, the meringue was underdried and has absorbed the cream. If the whole thing looks like a normal sponge cake with nuts on top, it is not a Kyiv cake at all, which happens more often than it should.

Then press it. The fork should go through the meringue with resistance and then release, and nothing on the plate should shatter or send fragments across the table. A cake that crunches loudly and aggressively has been eaten too soon after assembly. One that offers no resistance at all has sat too long and the meringue has drowned.

And taste it for salt and bitterness. Charlotte cream with no cocoa depth and no salt is just sweetened butter, and a cake this sweet needs something pulling in the other direction or it closes down after two forkfuls.

The nut question

Kyiv cake contains a lot of nuts and there is no version of it that does not. If somebody at the table cannot eat them, this is not the cake to order for a compromise, and we would rather say so than sell you one and hope.

Two things in the range do a similar job for a nut free table. The honey cake is layered, rested overnight, and about as far from a plain sponge as you can get without nuts. The Napoleon is soft, layered and vanilla scented, and it is the cake Kyiv cake tends to be bought alongside rather than instead of.

Esterházy Cake£76Sold outPavlova Cake£72

What to check if you are buying one elsewhere

London has a handful of places selling something called Kyiv cake and the quality range is wide, so here is what to ask.

Ask whether the meringue layers contain nuts. A nut free Kyiv cake is not a Kyiv cake with the nuts left out, it is a different construction, and it will not have the texture.

Ask how long ago it was assembled. A cake sold by the slice from a chilled display has been cut, and a cut Kyiv cake starts drying at the face immediately. By the second day on display the meringue at the edge is either hard or damp depending on the fridge.

Ask whether it is frozen and thawed. There is nothing shameful in this and it is how a great deal of Eastern European cake reaches London, but freezing a meringue cake costs you the thing you are paying for. Ice crystals form in the buttercream, and on thawing the water they leave behind goes straight into the meringue.

A cake baked to a date you chose has had none of that happen to it, which is the whole argument for ordering ahead rather than buying off a shelf.

Common questions

How far ahead do I need to order a Kyiv cake?

Forty eight hours. The meringue discs are dried slowly, the cake is assembled and then left to settle, and that sequence cannot be shortened. Choose a delivery date at least two days out and it will be made for that date rather than taken off a shelf.

What size is it and how many does it serve?

Ours is 18 cm across, which cuts into ten to twelve slices. It is a rich cake, so the slices are usually cut smaller than they would be from a sponge, and ten to twelve people is a comfortable number rather than a stretch.

Does it contain nuts?

Yes. Hazelnuts are in the meringue layers themselves, not on the outside, so they cannot be left off. It also contains gluten, eggs, soya and milk.

How should I keep it before serving?

In the fridge, boxed, and take it out around thirty to forty minutes before you cut it. Straight from the fridge the buttercream is firm and the flavour is muted. Left in a warm room for hours it softens too far and the layers begin to slide.

Is it the same as Kiev cake?

Yes. Kiev is the older English transliteration of the same city and the same cake. The Ukrainian spelling is Kyiv, which is what we use.

Where to order one in London

We bake in Belgravia and deliver across London and Surrey, £12 within central London postcodes and £15 everywhere else we reach, with a £50 minimum order. Choose your delivery date at checkout, at least 48 hours ahead, and the cake is made for that day.

If you grew up with this cake, order it and tell us how it compares to the one in the box your family carried on the train. People do, at length, and those messages are how the recipe has been adjusted more than once.