Polish cakes made in Poland

All unexceptional and available in pretty well every country.

I used to buy Maltanki sometimes. They were pleasant enough albeit austere.

I like simple cookies (like Danish butter cookies) and also like things like Petit Beure

To me they're what we in the Isles would call 'trifle sponges' and we would never eat them as a biscuit. Ours are oblong in shape and they're used for making certain kinds of cakes or desserts like trifle especially because they soak up sherry or other liquid very well. Not a fan of herbatniki either. They are mostly too sweet and not very good for dunking! I know, they're supposed to be crispy but dunking is one of life's great pleasures.

[quote=jon357]At home, it was mostly Rich Tea or 'Nice" [/!quote]
Same here. Rich Tea was considered 'a plain biscuit' but I liked them. I still do. Very comforting with a cup of tea if you have a headache or have had an upset tummy. You can get Rich Tea fingers in Dealz. Not as satisfying as the proper round ones but any old port in a storm! Nice were very sugary and old ladies seemed to love them. I remember them being served to old lady visitors with a glass of sherry.

Did you have Lincoln Creams in the UK? I really liked those. They were another sweeter plain biscuit considered suitable for the weekday biscuit tin. We only had 'sweet' biscuits with cream fillings on Sundays.

The only biccie that I truly detested was Marietta. No greater disappointment as a child than going visiting with your mother, out comes the biscuit tin and you're offered a Marietta :( I suppose Arrowroot were worse but they never really caught on in Ireland.

I think they're sometimes called boudoir biscuits. For trifles or for people so infirm and toothless that they can't manage wafers.


Sort of 'civil service' biscuits. When I worked at the Legal Aid Board back in pre-computer days when there was still a tea lady who called at each floor in turn twice a day there were always that sort of biscuits. Hobnobs eventually took over in offices.


I've never seen them. There were also Gypsy Creams which people mention but I'm not sure what they are.

A biscuit I don't like is Goosnargh Cakes, a Lancashire thing. Very plain with caraway seeds in.

I buy round sponge cakes in the Czech Republic. Interestingly, sometimes they are of Polish production.


On our holidays in England, Mrs. Alien and I always went for tea for two and Eccles cakes. They were delicious. We didn't bring sweets back from our holidays on the islands.

When I first moved to PL I was amused to see a brand of cakes labelled as "keks". Where I'm from, the word keks means underpants.

This word is certainly an Anglicanism but commonly used in Polish.

Not a brand, but a kind of cake. Sort of a light fruitcake.

I thought the meaning in Britain (as told to me be a northerner) was a lot worse than underpants....

But I like keks more than most fruitcake two different bakeries within walking distance make very nice ones.


As an inveterate dunker I remember being told (by a fellow American who'd been here longer) that I probably shouldn't dunk when around Polish people. I don't know if it's more acceptable now.

Best for dunking are churros, of course. Though I prefer them with coffee over hot chocolate...

No you're thinking of cack which means sh*t. There's also an expression, to be 'cack-handed' which means doing things badly, especially manual tasks.


I also worked in a place in London which shall remain nameless where we had two tea ladies who came morning and afternoons with the trolley. They were called Lil and Jean :) and they kept tight control of the biscuit tin. Jean was marginally less scary than Lil. It was Rich Tea and Digestives usually but occasionally there may have been Hob Nobs. We weren't allowed to have a kettle in the actual office space so if you wanted a cup of tea outside the official times, you had to go the kitchen and request one which meant bearding Lil and Jean in their den. Requests for tea received at best a frosty reception and at worst, one was scolded and harrangued throught the tea-making process. Happy memories!


Oh yes, now they're very nice. Lovely flaky pastry.

@Jon, here are the Lincoln Creams, a Jacobs biscuit - I don't remember Gypsy Creams but they had cream in the middle and they were just too sweet for my taste.

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Quite.

Interestingly men's knickers are called kecks in Sheffield, Rotherham, Leeds but down the road in Doncaster they're called kegs.


I'd try one. Maybe there's a historic connection with Lincoln.

I use that expression frequently...

Actually this guy said 'keks' (or... kecks I I guess) was specifically a way of referring to a dingleberry or dingleberries (you can look that up on your own and thank me later).

But he was very weird... so.... he may have been deluded or making stuff up.

People say that in Yorkshire too.


I do and don't give a damn if they look askance.

What is special about these doughnuts???

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Mini donuts made of homogenized cottage cheese.

Yes!! Mini doughnuts. But why cottage cheese??

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Cottage cheese or twarög? I'd use twaróg instead for cooking.

Some teachers celebrated their anniversaries with mini doughnuts, meat pastry, apple cake and other.

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Twaróg of course..... I didn't know there was such a word in English.

There isn't, however Americans refer to twaróg as Farmers' Cheese.

Cottage Cheese, made with curd grains and usually cream and titanium dioxide, is related to twaróg, but is a very different product. It's usually lower in fat than twaróg (I always prefer the full fat form of that) and therefore is t as useful for baking.

pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottage_cheese

One of many names along with Dutch cheese, curd cheese, pot cheese.... though it's not that popular/common.

I've also seen russian tvorog used in English.

That sounds a nicer name.

I always thought Americans thought of it as being similar to Quark.

My wife baked this one with our sour cherries and red currants.

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Looks nice.

I would have to agree with that and I've made a fair few of them, Sernik z rosą, Sernik Wiedeński, Sernik ze śliwkami and one with caramel which I forget the name of.

The next one I want to try making is Sernik królewski. It looks delicious.

I would prefer 'karpatka'.

That's my favourite!
I would advice making the dough few days earlier so it has time to freeze. The dough has to be grated ( at least the top. Bottom can be laid down) and I find it easier to not do everything in one day 😀

Have you made it many times? I'm looking at recipes and they all vary in amounts and types of ingredients. I think I'm going to try one by Kwestia Smaku.


Yes, I've read through a couple of recipes for the method. Like just about everything Polish, this cheesecake is time consuming! Hope it's worth the effort :)

Technically, gingerbread aka honey cake aka Polish piernik is a cake or cookie???

Poland and other countries of the region are famous for piernik goods.

Here is a gingerbread house we got for Christmas:

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Birthday cake for one of our kids. My wife`s creation, of course.

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