The moment I saw the butcher’s cake on Instagram I knew that this was going to be my, and therefore also your, Christmas cake. It was early November and you could bet that hundreds of potential Christmas cakes would appear in my timeline until Christmas. Somehow, though, my decision was immediately set in stone. Even if the cake gods had personally descended from cake heaven to whisper to me their most Christmassy cake recipe, I would have answered them: sorry, but my readers and I are already making the butcher’s cake this year.
It was difficult to imagine anything more Christmassy than this pastry: a round cake with a hole in it – a turban, I initially thought mistakenly, but more about that later -, sprinkled with a layer of fine white sugar, rosemary needles that looked exactly like that like the dried spruce needles that I usually find under my radiators until February and golden brown pine nuts like small, nutty gems half-buried under the snow. The accompanying text completed the dream: The Olive Oil Cake That Made Nancy Silverton Question her Own.
A little explanation: Nancy Silverton is at the helm of Osteria Mozza in Los Angeles and is one of the most famous pastry chiefs of the United States. Good to know, because it shows how spectacular this cake is – after all, cake goddess Silverton thinks it’s even better than her own olive oil cake. But this isn’t about her. No, it’s about the butcher who came up with the cake. Dario Cecchini is of course not just any butcher, but one of the most famous in the world, and certainly the most famous in Italy. In addition to his butcher shop in the village of Panzano in Chianti (Tuscany), Cecchini’s empire also includes three restaurants. There is an episode of the Netflix series Chef’s table dedicated to him and the entire global, gastronomic community walks away with him. (Well, except for the vegetarian and vegan part of it).
There is much interesting to say about this eighth-generation butcher. For example, before he decided to join the family business, he studied veterinary medicine and twenty years ago, at the time of mad cow disease, he once organized a funeral for the bistecca Fiorentina, the classic Florentine T-bone steak from Chianina beef. But we need to get back to that cake. Cecchini presents it, I read, as dessert after a seven-course meat menu. And while that sounds like he might as well serve it with a family pack of Rennies, the cake is surprisingly light, or at least a lot lighter than you’d expect. This is partly because no butter is used and partly because the bulk of the cake consists of orange cut into brunoise.
Above I wrote that I accidentally mistook the cake for a turban. Only when I started looking into the recipe did I discover that it is baked in a angel food cake pan (a round pan with smooth, straight walls and a hole in the center) and that the bottom serves as the top. Because the latter looks a bit strange on a turban, and because I suspect that most… NRCreaders are more likely to have a bundt pan at home than an angel food cake pan, I have decided to adjust the recipe slightly. It is no longer one hundred percent the butcher’s cake. A truly heavenly Christmas cake.
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