Old-fashioned charm makes for showstopping cake

When my friend Ursula Reshoft-Hegewisch offers to bring dessert, my answer is always yes.

Over the years, she’s arrived at my door with all manner of elaborate confections — a Sacher torte, a chocolate-hazelnut cake, assortments of Viennese Christmas cookies and a billowing almond dacquoise filled with mocha buttercream, each carefully made in the kitchen of her nearby brownstone.

Her most recent offering was something I’d never even heard of.

“Blitz torte,” she said as she pulled two very unusual-looking golden rounds from an oversize shopping bag. The bottoms were made of yellow cake, rich with egg yolks and buttery. And on top of each was a baked-on swath of meringue — swirled, browned and covered in chopped pecans. Just before serving, she put the rounds together, sandwiching the layers with whipped cream and fresh berries, which oozed delectably when she cut in.

The torte was a bit like strawberry shortcake — the kind made with cake rather than biscuits — but it had the added appeal of crunchy meringue and plenty of toasted nuts. And it was easily one of the best sweets I’d eaten all year.

The recipe, which I begged for before Ursula even left the house that night, came from her grandmother Genevieve Lehmont. Ursula doesn’t know where her grandmother originally got it, but I found a blitz-torte recipe in my copy of “The Settlement Cookbook” that was almost identical. The only difference was that it called for almonds instead of pecans.

Compared with other tortes, a blitz torte is relatively quick to put together (the word “blitz” means “lightning” in German and was often used historically to name speedy baked goods). The meringue, which browns on top but stays soft inside, takes the place of icing and gives the cake an elegant look.

When Ursula’s mother, Patricia O’Neal, started making the cake in the 1960s, she used fresh berries. But in the 1930s and ’40s, Genevieve preferred canned pineapple.

“Canned pineapple was a lot fancier back then,” Ursula told me. “Georgia O’Keeffe went to Hawaii to paint pineapples for Dole ads, which my grandmother saw in Vogue magazine. To her, canned pineapple was chic.”

I went with raspberries when I made the torte. And my only other change was to add dashes of nutmeg, vanilla and salt to the batter to heighten the flavors. But otherwise, I left things alone. Because blitz torte has that delightful, oldfashioned charm that never goes out of style.