Making my mother Sri Lankan Love cake has become a tradition.
The recipe I bake yields a hefty portion.
The Love cake is dense, it’s not designed to be wolfed down in a single session. It’s a cake to savour and relishes to cherish while sipping a cup of Sri Lankan tea.
I have made so many Love cakes, yet it’s only now that I have started to dig deeper into the provenance of Love Cake.
When you bite into a Sri Lankan Love cake, eat through centuries of culture, history and personal stories of migration.
We Sri Lankans love our cakes. Sri Lankan cuisine has a repertoire of cake recipes: simple butter cake, love cake, bibikkan, breudher, coco de bolo, bolo folhado, ribbon cake and, of course, Sri Lankan Christmas cake.
These are the most well-known, delve into the pages of Hilda Deutrom’s Ceylon Daily News Cookery Book, and you’ll discover more.
Every family has their personal recipe. It’s the recipe that gets handed down through the generations from grandmothers, mothers, daughters, aunts, and cousins.
My Love cake recipe is a version of my mother’s.
No one really knows the true heritage of Love cake. Some claim its origins are Dutch, while others claim it’s Portuguese. Love cake’s identity is rooted in the Sri Lankan Burgher community, descendants of Portuguese and Dutch rule.
If you take a closer look at the Love cake recipe you realise the ingredients give us a clue as to how Love cake came about – colonial Ceylon and the heady spice notes from cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg nod to the global movement of people and cultures.
I tend to make this cake around Valentine’s day. Love cake is considered to be a celebration cake for birthdays and Christmas, cut into squares (or rectangles) and packaged into wrapping paper.
Love cake has a very distinct texture. Bite through the cake’s thin crispy crust into the soft, moist, crumbly cake flavoured with citrus, rosewater and spices.
The only way to experience Love cake is to make it. Or find someone who will make it for you.
Sri Lankan love cake is seriously rich and seriously sweet. With seven eggs, half a kilo of sugar and jam-packed with cashew nuts, it is irresistible.
You can guarantee every family has their own recipe and you can bet everyone’s mother has the best recipe for love cake.
There are many recipes for love cake with many variations of ingredients from pumpkin preserve to strawberry jam. The main ingredients for love cake are cashew nuts, eggs, sugar and semolina.
I always add Maldive fish to my mallungs. The Maldive fish adds an umami quality giving the dish another layer of flavour. I’ve yet to find a vegetarian or vegan alternative. To make this a plant-based recipe skip the fish.
You’ll find Maldive fish in Sri Lankan grocery stores or online in stores like the Asian Cook Shop.
Love cake is easy to make. Essentially it’s a very dense traybake. Most recipes will ask you to separate the eggs. Add the egg yolks to the sugar and mix. Beat the egg whites to glossy peaks and mixed in at the end.
I have found that cooking times do vary. Love cake can take from an hour to an hour and a half to bake. Love cake needs patience, you can’t hurry a love cake.
I place the cake on the middle shelf of the oven. You can cover the cake with foil to prevent the surface of the cake from over-baking. Remove the foil for the last twenty minutes of baking.
When your skewer comes out of your Love Cake clean, it’s done. Take it out of the oven, set it aside and let it cool.
ore says this cake was baked to win the hearts of your lover. And just like falling in love, this cake is deliciously intense.
Research credit: “Love Cake: Authenticity and the boundaries of ‘Eurasian’ in the hybrid kitchen by Michelle Barrett.
