Stonska torta 🇭🇷

The cake from Ston, a small historical Croatian town near Dubrovnik, is a traditional cake. It is mainlyprepared fror bigger festivities like Easter and Christmas. Even if it is known and made for centuries, there exist no ‘proper’ recipe – the recipes vary across families and are mostly transmitted from one generation to another. Even if Croatian cuisine is yummy, as many know, most traditional Croatian dishes came into existence through fusion with cuisines of neighboring or conquering nations. Stonska torta is different – as far as (not only I) investigated, it seems to be truly original Croatian.

What is common to all the variations of the recipe for this truly unusual cake are the following key points: (1) outer thin layer of dough, (2) three fillings – one of cooked macaroni (yup, pasta is inside!), one a dry chocolate-ground nuts mix, and one of eggs and butter (sometimes mixed, sometimes separated), and (3) the fillings are layered according to the abcabc… principle.

The cake is truly unusual, not too sweet and also not too hard to make, so give it a go!

Suitable for: Stonska torta is halal and kosher, vegetarian, but not vegan. It contains nuts, lactose and glutene, but doesn’t contain soy nor shellfish.

🇭🇷 🇭🇷 🇭🇷 (medium hard do make)

🌱🌞🍂☃️

Ingredients 🛒 (for a 24 cm diameter cake tin)

Dough: 400 g (coarse) flour, 2 eggs, 1/2 tsp salt, 2 tbsp olive oil, ca. 1 glass of water

1st filling: 400 g penne or similar noodles

2nd filling: 100 g grated chocolate, 200-250 g sugar, 250 g ground walnuts (or walnut-almond mix), grated lemon zest of 1-2 lemons, 1 tbsp vanilla sugar, 1 tsp ground cinnamon

3rd filling: 6 eggs, 250 g butter

Adfitionally: ca. 50 g butter

Optional: icing sugar

How to 🍳

Put a big pot filled with water onto stove, leave to boil.

Prepare the dough: Mix all ingredients except water, and start kneading, adding water only when necessary. You want a smooth, medium hard dough. Cover and leave to rest while you prepare the fillings.

Filling 1: Cook the noodles al dente, rinse with cold water.

Filling 2: Mix all the ingredients for it.

Filling 3: Beat the eggs with a fork (not a machine!). You just want to make them homogeneous, but don’t overbeat them. Melt the butter in a pan and when it’s not hot anymore stir into eggs. Alternatively you can put butter flakes onto eggs when filling the cake as a 4th layer.

Roll out the dough to ca. 48 cm (double the tin’s) diameter. Melt the 50 g butter, use a little bit to grease the tin. Center the dough into the tin.

Start filling: one layer of noodles, one layer of nutty chocolate, one layer of eggs and butter. Repeat until you run out of a filling or reach the top of your tin. Wrap the hanging dough over it, use your fingers to close it well. Grease with remaining butter.