Name: Debra Marmor
Class Year: 1980
Country of Residence: United Kingdom

Why is this recipe great? What’s its backstory? 

We used to visit our relatives in Israel every couple of years when I was little. In honor of our visit, my aunt would make this marvellous chocolate cake – my sister and I would fight my uncle for the last crumb.

We were so enamored of this cake that my mother eventually wrote my uncle (?!) for the recipe. Apparently, my mother and sister had difficulty deciphering what came back, so my sister kept experimenting and eventually came up with a version that seemed to fit her memory.

Last year, my husband and I were visiting my sister in Connecticut and I found her redux version of the recipe, so snapped a copy. But, when I looked at it more closely, it did not match my memory at all of Tante Dvorah’s cake. More email exchanges with my sister, and, lo and behold, she actually found my uncle’s original letter and transcribed it for me.
As an aside, my uncle had emigrated to (then) Palestine from Vienna, Austria.

Consequently, the original letter was written in Viennese German with the typical (to our minds) imprecise home cooking quantities (soup spoons of flour, little glasses of Cognac, a glass of sugar, etc.), and much left for granted by my non-baking uncle!

I, of course, had to make a half batch of both versions. The one in my uncle’s letter (with my sister’s quantity adaptations) won hands down. So here you go (don’t worry, you’ll barely taste the coconut):

Tante Dvorah’s Chocolate and Coconut Cake

Serves 8. 1 hours + cooling/ chilling

Ingredients:

Cake:

• 1 cup coconut
• ½ cup self-rising flour
• ¼ cup cocoa
• 100g chocolate, grated
• 4 eggs, separated
• 1 cup sugar (½ +½)
• 100g butter, softened
• 2 shots/4 oz cognac or reasonable facsimile thereof

Coffee Glaze:

• 1 tsp Nescafe powder
• ½ cup simmering water
• 1 tsp sugar

Chocolate Glaze:

• 100g Chocolate
• 60g butter/Margarin
• 1 glug Cognac (less than a shot)

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350^o F/ 175^o C.
2. Grease and flour 8 ½-inch cake pan
3. Mix coconut, flour, cocoa and grated chocolate in a medium bowl
4. Combine 4 egg yolks, butter and ½ cup sugar until creamy in bowl of stand mixer (my aunt would have done this by hand!)
5. Add dry ingredients to egg/ butter cream; combine briefly
6. Add cognac (or your reasonable facsimile thereof); mix on slow until combined
7. In a separate bowl, whip the 4 egg whites until foamy.
8. Add the other ½ cup of sugar slowly while continuing beating until soft peaks form
9. Gently fold egg whites into the batter until no white streaks remain
10. Bake in the preheated oven for 30-40 minutes until done (whatever you chose to insert comes out dry)
11. When cake comes out of the oven, mix the Nescafe, water and sugar for the coffee glaze.
12. Pour the coffee glaze all over the cake while it is still hot/ warm. Let cake cool completely.
13. Take the cake out of the pan.
14. Melt the chocolate, butter/ margarine and Cognac (or facsimile) together
15. Pour all over the cake slowly
16. Chill until set.
17. If you want to get fancy or alert folks to one of the ingredients, sprinkle some dried coconut over the top.

Source:

Tante Dvorah from Onkel Mundah’s letter.