What is the most complicated cake recipe?

 Thinking back to culinary school, there was one cake that I knew I would never be able to replicate at home. There are a relatively finite number of traditional methods and ingredients in cake before you’re really bastardizing the idea of what a cake is. But there is one thing that can turn a classic baked good from “doable” to “impossible” and that’s the tools needed to make it.

Not everyone can have a deck oven at home or a proof box or a blast freezer, but most of those things can be adapted for standard home appliances. But in order to make a German Baumkuchen, you’ll need a German Baumkuchen Machine that looks like this:

It’s a trifecta of tricky ingredients, execution, and tools needed to make it.

The Baumkuchen requires a somewhat pricey and complicated formula involving beating almond paste and butter and egg yolks, then making a meringue mixture from egg white, sugar and cornstarch, combining those, then adding pastry flour to form a very loose batter.

Then, if you have a baumkuchen machine, you would apply a layer of batter to a wooden “spit” that resembles a rolling pin contraption. As you rotate the thin layer of batter, a high heat flame or heat element evenly bakes the batter. Once fully baked, you would apply a layer of loose apricot preserve. Then you apply another layer of cake batter. Bake on the spit. Add more preserve, and repeat until you have upwards of twenty layers.

The final product, once removed from the “spit” is essentially a cake log. When cut in a cross section, you can see every single layer of moist cake separated by layers of sweet apricot. They can be cut into portions and are often then coated in chocolate and look like this:

We were taught that you can simulate the process in a standard sheet pan, and end up with a similar long sheet cake with lots and lots of thin layers, which we were instructed to disassemble and form into a gateaux. Here was mine from back in the day.

It’s not easy, but it is delicious and worth buying if you can get your hands on one. Also bless your heart if you want to take a stab at making one.

Edit: Thank you for all of the kind words about this post as well as my student work! I had no idea that Baumkuchen was also very popular in Japan in particular.

I’d also like to add that if the Baumkuchen is coated in chocolate, it could also add another layer of difficulty. Using high quality chocolate and learning how to properly temper and handle it is a feat all its own!

And I was suggested an edit for my spelling of meringue, but to clarify:

Meringue: (French language) a whipped mixture of egg white and sugar.

Merengue: (Spanish language) a type of dance originating from the Dominican Republic.