FOOD NEWS
Sutemeny Rigo Jancsi: The Hungarian Chocolate Cake With A Dramatic History
BY JULIA HOLLAND
The Hungarian dish Sutemeny Rigo Jansci is a chocolate cake featuring layers of mousse and apricot jam created to commemorate a 20th-century scandal involving royalty.
The dessert marks the scandalous love triangle of American socialite Clara Ward, her Belgian-prince husband, and Rigo Jansci, a traveling musician with whom Ward fell in love.
Ward met Jansci in 1896, and after the two eloped, they traveled from France to Budapest, where a baker created a cake to celebrate Jansci and Ward's love.
Ironically, the cake eventually became more sensational than the couple and remained popular even after the disintegration of their short-lived marriage.
The cake is a decadent creation consisting of layers of chocolate sponge cake, creamy chocolate mousse spiked with rum and vanilla, and a rich, shiny chocolate glaze.
The cake remains popular; you can even find variations that add espresso or apricot jam to the mousse layer or brush rum simple syrup over the sponge cake for extra moisture.