Doberge cake (often pronounced "doh-bash") is a layered dessert originating in
New Orleans
New Orleans (commonly known as NOLA or The Big Easy among other nicknames) is a Consolidated city-county, consolidated city-parish located along the Mississippi River in the U.S. state of Louisiana. With a population of 383,997 at the 2020 ...
, Louisiana, U.S., adapted by local baker
Beulah Ledner from the
Hungarian Dobos torte
Dobos torte ( ), also known as Dobosh, is a Hungarian sponge cake layered with chocolate buttercream and topped with caramel. The layered pastry is named after its inventor, Hungarian chef , a delicatessen owner in Budapest. In the late 1800s, ...
. Still popular in the area, the cake is made of multiple thin layers of
cake
Cake is a flour confection usually made from flour, sugar, and other ingredients and is usually baked. In their oldest forms, cakes were modifications of bread, but cakes now cover a wide range of preparations that can be simple or elabor ...
alternating with
dessert pudding. Very often the cakes are made with half chocolate pudding and half lemon pudding. They are covered in a thin layer of
butter cream and a fondant shell or, alternatively, a poured glaze on the outside. They are normally made with six or more layers. Traditional flavors are chocolate, lemon or caramel.
History
Beulah Levy Ledner, born into a Jewish family in
St. Rose, Louisiana, opened a bakery in New Orleans in 1933. She became very successful after creating her "Doberge cake" adapted from the Hungarian/Austrian
Dobos Cake, a cake made of nine
génoise cake layers filled with
buttercream
Buttercream, also referred to as butter icing (food), icing or butter frosting, is used for either filling (cooking), filling, coating or cake decorating, decorating cakes. The main ingredients are butter and some type of sugar.
Buttercream is ...
and topped with a hard
caramel
Caramel ( or ) is a range of food ingredients made by heating sugars to high temperatures. It is used as a flavoring in puddings and desserts, as a filling in bonbons or candy bars, as a topping for ice cream and custard, and as a colorant ...
glaze.
[
] The doberge cake is based on a recipe originating in
Alsace-Lorraine. Ledner replaced the buttercream filling of the Dobos Cake with a custard filling and iced the cakes with buttercream and a thin layer of
fondant.
Beulah Ledner's recipe is available in the cookbook, ''Let's bake with Beulah Ledner: A legendary New Orleans Lady'' by Maxine Wolchansky.
In 1946 Joe Gambino bought the name, recipe and retail shop, including her recipe for doberge cake and a promise that she would not reopen in New Orleans for five years. After a couple of years of illness, she reopened in a new location on Metairie Road in the New Orleans suburb of
Metairie under the name "Beulah Ledner, Inc." As her business and popularity grew, her son, Albert, designed and built a new building and a new machine to mass-produce sheet cakes using his mother's recipes. She opened her new bakery on May 21, 1970; she ran it until she retired in 1981 at the age of 87, when she sold the shop and doberge recipe to Maurice's French Pastries,
which was still in the business of baking and selling doberge cakes in Metairie as of early 2022.
See also
*
List of cakes
A list is a set of discrete items of information collected and set forth in some format for utility, entertainment, or other purposes. A list may be memorialized in any number of ways, including existing only in the mind of the list-maker, but ...
References
{{Cakes
Cuisine of New Orleans
Jewish cuisine
Layer cakes