Bled Cream Cake (Blejska kremšnita)

Lake Bled is the most popular tourist destination in Slovenia, complete with a fairytale cliff-top castle and a church on its only island. And no trip to Bled is complete without a Blejska kremšnita or Bled cream cake. If you are Slovenian, you not only enjoy a kremšnita while sitting at a cafe overlooking the lake, but you also always take a few slices to the less lucky relatives that stayed at home.

The Bled cream cake was invented by Ištvan Lukačević, a native of Vojvodina, who came to Slovenia as a pastry chef after World War II. It was based on recipes that a son of a baker, whose last name was Ravnik, collected at the turn of the 20th century after traveling in Austria and Germany, including a recipe for vanilla pastry cream. Lukačević worked at the Ravnik bakery during the winters, where he learned all the family recipes, including the vanilla pastry cream recipe, which later became the central ingredient of the Bled cream cake. In the summers he worked at the Park Hotel Café and he got an idea to replace šamšnita, then on the menu, with a lighter dessert. You can still try out the result, Blejska kremšnita, at the Park Hotel Café to this day. However, more and more Slovenians are starting to swear by homemade pastry cream.

Bogataj, Janez.  Taste Slovenia. Ljubljana: Rokus Gifts & National Geographic, 2007.

Recipe

Ingredients (for a rectangular 35x24 cm springform pan):

• 500 g puff pastry

• 1,6 l whole milk

• 9 eggs (room temperature)

• 400 g sugar (300 g to be mixed with egg yolks, 100 g to be mixed with egg whites)

• 180 g flour

• 2 tbsp corn starch

• 20 g vanilla sugar (can be replaced with 2 tsp vanilla paste)

• 2 tbsp spiced rum (I always use domači rum, a spirit produced in Slovenia)

• 1/2 tsp cream of tartar (or something else to stabilize the egg whites - 1 tsp vinegar or lemon juice)

• 750 ml heavy cream

• 1 tsp vanilla paste

Instructions:

Baking the puff pastry

1. Roll out the puff pastry dough into two rectangles of the size 36x25cm. It will shrink when baked, so it must be slightly bigger than the dimensions of the baking pan.

2. Prick the dough with a fork. This allows the steam to escape so that the dough does not puff up in the oven. 

3. Bake each sheet of dough at 215C for the first 5 minutes, then reduce the heat to 180C, and bake for another 15 minutes; finally reduce the temperature to 160C and bake for a few more minutes (at most 10).

4. Let the dough cool down.

Vanilla pastry cream

1. Separate the egg whites and the egg yolks. If you have a stand mixer, put the egg whites into the stand mixer bowl. If not, put them into a large bowl.

2. Add 0,2 l milk, 400 g sugar, vanilla sugar, and flour to the egg yolks and mix until you get a uniform mixture.

3. Mix 0,1 l milk with corn starch until completely smooth.

4. Add 1,3 l milk to a large heavy bottom sauce pan and bring to a boil.

5. Add the cream of tartar to the egg whites and beat them until soft peaks form. Then start adding 100 g sugar while continuously beating the egg whites until they appear glossy and stand in stiff peaks.

6. Pour the egg yolk and the corn starch mixture into the simmering milk and beat with an electric mixer continuously until the cream becomes thick, about 15 minutes. The temperature should not be too high, so that the vanilla cream doesn't burn. This is the most important step - if the vanilla cream is not cooked enough, you will have to serve your kremšnita in a cup.

7. Beat the thick egg white mixture while pouring into it the hot vanilla cream. It should not take more than a minute for the vanilla cream to be incorporated into the meringue. Add 2 tbsp of rum.

Making the cream cake

1. Put one sheet of baked puff pastry dough into the springform pan. Pour the vanilla custard into it and wait for it to cool down, about 5 hours.

2. Whip the heavy cream with vanilla paste and spread it over the vanilla custard.

3. The base of the cream cake is a 7x7 cm rectangle. It is easiest to cut the second sheet of dough into 7x7 squares before placing it on the whipped cream layer. I actually keep the squares separately, and only put them on kremšnite just before serving to ensure that the puff pastry squares remain crunchy.

4. Slice the cake, sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve.