Prinzregententorte

Prinzregententorte belongs to Munich and the Konditorei window, the cake you bring out for a birthday, a name day, or the Sunday coffee table when ordinary sponge won't do. It is Bavarian, but not beer-tent Bavarian. Das ist kein Bierzelt. It is disciplined cake work: pale, thin biscuit layers, chocolate buttercream, and a dark glaze that should sit smooth enough to see the knife mark when you cut it.

The regions disagree because the country always does. In the north you see more cream cakes and fruit cakes, lighter and colder from the café case; in Bavaria this one stands on buttercream and order. Even inside Bavaria the argument starts at the number of layers: seven for the modern districts, eight when the old Palatinate is counted. I bake seven here because it gives a confident home cook a tall, clean torte without turning the afternoon into factory work.

The technique is simple and unforgiving: bake the layers separately and thin. Don't bake one tall sponge and cut it into seven. A single sponge dries at the edges before the middle sets, then tears under the knife. Thin layers bake fast, stay flexible, and stack cleanly with a skim of buttercream between them. Erst verstehen, dann kochen.

Let the buttercream and the cake sit before glazing. Cold layers hold their shape, and a rested torte cuts straight instead of sliding around the board. Das braucht seine Zeit. Pretty is not the point, but a straight slice tells the truth.