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Tag: baking

  • Ilonka Rozalia – maker of a traditional Hungarian cake

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    Guse is a traditional cake made by Hungarian-speaking people in Transylvania. Ms. Ilonka had got up at at half past five in the morning in order start making the dough, then let it leaven until our arrival at about 10. In fact, she had prepared about 10 bun-shapes of dough with a diameter of about 15 cm.

    Upon our arrival, she put flour on a long-handled shovel and applied it evenly, next she put the dough on the shovel, flattened it and shaped it flush with the shovel. Next, she applied a mixture of crude cheese, sour cream, vanilla, sugar, lemon peel, eggs on top of the dough, applying it evenly before putting it into the wood-fired oven, let it bake for 5-10 minutes and extracted it with the same shovel. Finally, her daughter put on melted butter and sugar on the cake.

    We were allowed to eat as much as we wanted when the cakes were finished, but we had to stop eating after a short time because the stomach got full after a short time.

    Like many others in this village, the Ilonka family live in a former farm, but now they have only one horse and one cow.

    The town of Marefalva (Satu Mare) is famous for its Szekler gates and a guide from the local tourist office showed us most of them after our visit to the Ilonka family. Besides, we were told about how they were used, what some of the carvings meant, etc.

  • Sara Filep making a traditional Transylvanian cake

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    We went to the village of Sic, which is renowned for its summer festival where the locals are wearing traditional costumes, dancing, singing and performing.

    Sic means salt and the village is named after the nearby salt mines which were at their peak production in the nineteenth century, attracting people from afar and making Sic a town. After the mines were closed, Sic gradually returned to being a village having about 2500 inhabitants.

    We stayed at a guesthouse in Sic and the aunt of the owner, Sara Filep, was fortunately willing to show us how she made a traditional Transylvanian cake called Kurtos Kalacs. It’s shaped like a hollow cylinder and the name Kurtos comes from the word for the shape of a bull’s horn in Romanian.

    Sara mixed flour, egg, milk, vegetable oil, salt and yeast in a bowl and she worked very hard at kneading the dough. While the dough was leavening, one of her relatives put made two parallel rows of bricks on the ground, put some firewood between them and lit a fire. When it was burnt out, it was time to bake the cakes.

    Before starting the baking, she formed small parts of the dough into long and thin lines which she rotated around a wooden cylinder to which was attached a long wooden stick. However, she always applied sunflower oil to the wooden cylinder before attaching the dough in order to facilitate the loosening of the cake after having been baked. Besides, she rolled the dough in sugar.  Having finished this, she let someone else rotate the cylinder above the embers for some time. When all the surface of the cake had become light brown, she knocked the cylinder carefully against the ground such that the cake was released. This procedure was repeated until a lot of cakes had been made.

    It seemed like rumour was spread that this delicious cake was being made or maybe it was the nice smell since people from the village were gradually arriving. Anyway, the cake was delicious and I certainly had my fill.