I've been wanting to make a Prinzregententorte for months. It's an elegant cake, a royal cake ... an epic cake. The kind of cake you get from Limnos or Cassis. It takes hours and hours and hours to make, and it's such a risk to invest that much time and energy (not to mention money!) into something you've never seen or tasted for yourself. But I made it anyway. And it was worth it.



It's a six-layer cake made up of six small sponges (individually baked) and a whole lot of chocolate. The sponges are delicious (they taste exactly like Boudoir Biscuits!) and they are joined together by layers of Buttercream in alternating flavours: Chocolate, Bailey's Irish Cream, Coffee, Bailey's, Chocolate. The whole cake is covered with a chocolate-Irish-cream glaze and finished with chocolate shavings.

As far as I know, the Prinzregententorte (shall we just call it 'Prince Regent Cake? It's awfully royal anyway) has its origins as a Bavarian treat, served for his Royal Highness Prince Regent Luitpold. For us, it's just extra-yummy cake which should be served at any special occasion or opportunity. With coffee. It's positively scrumptious.

Be prepared to set aside at least three hours for mixing, beating, battering, baking, icing, glazing, and decorating. It might take less (or more, if you have little people helping) but three hours is a good bench mark.

For the cake:

- 250g of butter, slightly softened
- 250g of caster sugar
- 50g of cornflour
- 200g of flour
- 1 teaspoon of baking powder
- 4 eggs
- 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

1. Pre-heat the oven to 200'C.
2. Cream the butter and the caster sugar together until light and fluffy. Then, slowly add the eggs.
3. Sift in the dry ingredients and fold in lightly.
4. Grease a loose-bottomed 25cm round baking tin. Line it with a circle of baking paper (I traced the bottom of the tin and cut out six circles).
5. Spoon 1/6th of the batter into the bottom of the tin. Make sure that the batter is spread evenly across the bottom of the tin. Bake for approximately ten minutes.
6. Turn out the baked sponge, remove the paper and let the sponge cool while you do the next layer.
7. The rest of the layers should be completed by using 1/5th of the batter, 1/4, 1/3 and so on until you have six very nice (and tempting!) sponge layers.

If you do six layers, you end up with a good thickness that is just short of 1cm. Here's a side view:




Don't throw away your baking paper! Use it to separate your layers if you're tempted to stack them (like I was). Otherwise, they stick together and you had better have a nice icing spatula to separate them.