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by leke 48 days ago
Well, not sure if it's classed as a cake, but my favourite desert there was the egg custard tart.
2 comments

Oh, yes, me too!

Something I really missed in a decade living in Czechia.

It's odd how in other countries it is mostly baked goods that have deep differences and leave whole much-loved categories missing. For me: pasties, mince pies, egg custard tarts, Jamaican-style patties.

The Slavs love this stuff called tvaroh: it's the curds that, given more work and time, can be made into cheese. It's a semisolid sour-tasting milky stuff. They put it in all kinds of foods, especially cakes and pastries. I first tasted it at 46 years old and I hate the stuff. Every visit to a bakery is a lottery: will it be all right, and maybe even good, or will it have tvaroh in it and taste like it was made with extract of very old gym sock?

I taught English for a while and many students wanted to know the English word for Tvaroh as it's not in the dictionary. I told them we don't eat it and so don't have a word for it. It blew their minds.

It is not cottage cheese. It is nothing even vaguely similar to lemon curd. It's sort of similar to cheese curd but you can't buy cheese curd, whereas every supermarket has a dozen types of tvaroh.

Is it a cake? Is a tart a pie? I always went for the little custard tarts too.

Makes me think of the cake vs. biscuit philosophical arguments:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Cakes#Classification_and...