157 Fun Facts About Dessert

What does the Italian name of the dessert tiramisu literally mean?

Pick me up is the literal sense of tirami sù; despite its classic status the dessert is young, probably invented in north-eastern Italy in the 1960s.

Which New York restaurant is credited with naming baked Alaska after the 1867 purchase from Russia?

Delmonico's gets the credit for the tribute to the Alaska purchase, though its chef Charles Ranhofer listed the dessert as 'Alaska, Florida', a nod to its contrast of cold ice cream and hot meringue.

The pavlova, the meringue dessert fought over by Australia and New Zealand, is named after a famous Russian what?

Ballerina Anna Pavlova toured Australasia in 1926 and 1929, and the airy meringue is said to echo her lightness on stage or, in one telling, her fluffy tutu.

Franz Sacher, who created the Sachertorte as a teenager, served in the kitchen of which statesman?

Prince Metternich, Austria's chancellor, wanted a special dessert in 1832; the story goes that his head chef was ill, so 16-year-old apprentice Franz Sacher stepped in and devised the chocolate cake.

Tarte Tatin, the caramelised apple tart named after two sisters who ran a hotel, is baked in which unusual way?

Upside down, with the pastry laid over apples caramelising in butter and sugar, then flipped to serve; the Tatin sisters never called it by their name, which caught on only after their deaths.

In which country was banoffee pie invented in the early 1970s, at a restaurant called the Hungry Monk?

England is its home: at the Hungry Monk in Jevington, owner Nigel Mackenzie and chef Ian Dowding reworked an American coffee toffee pie, and the banana version proved so popular they could not take it off the menu.

Legend says the first brownie was made at the Palmer House for ladies attending which 1893 event?

The Chicago World's Fair of 1893 led Bertha Palmer to ask her hotel's kitchen for a cake small enough to eat from a boxed lunch, and the walnut-topped square it produced is the hotel's claim to the brownie.

Which youth organisation did a 1925 Connecticut newspaper describe eating 'Some-mores'?

Girl Scouts printed the recipe as 'Some More' in their 1927 handbook Tramping and Trailing, with the dry warning that though it tastes like 'some more', one is really enough.

Which dessert was created at Brennan's in New Orleans in 1951, when the city was a major gateway for its fruit?

Bananas Foster was chef Paul Blangé's 1951 answer to the banana cargoes then arriving from Latin America; it honours Richard Foster, a friend of owner Owen Brennan who chaired the city's Crime Commission.

Peach Melba was created in the 1890s at London's Savoy Hotel by which celebrated French chef?

Auguste Escoffier, then the Savoy's chef, first served it in an ice swan, a nod to the swan in Wagner's Lohengrin, which soprano Nellie Melba had just sung at Covent Garden; the raspberry sauce came later.

The name of the cream-filled éclair comes from a French word meaning what?

Éclair is French for 'flash of lightning': one theory says it is eaten in a flash, another that its glossy icing glistens like lightning; the word is first recorded in the 1860s.

The rum-soaked baba, born in France, became a signature pastry of which Italian city, where it is called babà?

Naples made the babà its own, and it is a listed traditional product of Campania; the cake's story starts with the exiled king Stanislaus, said to have had a dry cake doused in liquor.

Brazil's beloved brigadeiro, a chocolate fudge ball rolled in sprinkles, was created to promote what?

Confectioner Heloísa Nabuco de Oliveira made them for Brigadier Eduardo Gomes's 1945 presidential campaign; he lost the election to Eurico Dutra, but the condensed-milk sweet conquered the country.

The pastel de nata custard tart traces its recipe to the Jerónimos Monastery in which city?

Lisbon's Jerónimos Monastery, in the Belém district, closed in 1834; the recipe is said to have passed to a nearby sugar refinery, whose owners opened the Pastéis de Belém bakery in 1837.

The caramelised, buttery kouign-amann originated around 1860 in which region of France?

Brittany's fishing port of Douarnenez credits baker Yves-René Scordia; the Breton name means 'butter cake', and as it bakes the folded-in sugar seeps out and caramelises into a crisp shell.

The Australian lamington is believed to be named after a Governor of which state?

Queensland's governor from 1896 to 1901 was Lord Lamington; his French-born chef Armand Galland reportedly improvised the treat for unexpected guests, dipping leftover sponge in chocolate and coconut.

Which soda-fountain classic did 23-year-old pharmacy apprentice David Strickler create in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in 1904?

The banana split was Strickler's answer to fruit-laden sundaes he had seen in Atlantic City; he charged a dime, twice the price of other sundaes, and it still caught on with local students.

Which frozen treat did Frank Epperson say he invented aged 11 by leaving a drink outside on a cold night?

The Popsicle, by Epperson's own account, began when a drink and its stirring stick froze overnight in 1905; he first sold it as the Epsicle and is said to have renamed it at his children's urging.

Which brand did carpenter and cough-syrup maker Pearle Wait trademark in 1897, then sell for just $450?

Jell-O sold so poorly for Wait that he let it go in 1899 to neighbour Orator Woodward, whose magazine adverts from 1902 billed it as 'America's Most Famous Dessert'.

In 2011 which US state officially recognised the whoopie pie as its state treat?

Maine's lawmakers first proposed it as the state dessert, then settled on 'state treat' and gave the dessert title to wild blueberry pie; Pennsylvania's Amish country also claims the cake.

Boston cream pie is said to have been created in the 1850s by a French chef at which hotel?

Parker House, which also gave its name to a soft dinner roll, claims the dessert; it is a cake called a pie because cooks of the day baked both in the same pans and used the words interchangeably.

Cherries jubilee, flambéed cherries served over vanilla ice cream, was created for a jubilee of which monarch?

Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee of 1897 is the occasion most accounts give for the flaming cherries; the Victoria sponge also carries her name, as she was said to be fond of it.

Baklava's Turkish version was probably perfected in the imperial kitchens of which Ottoman palace in Constantinople, today's Istanbul?

Topkapı Palace's kitchens made baklava a ritual: on the 15th of each Ramadan the sultan sent trays of it to his Janissary troops in a procession known as the Baklava Alayı.

Gulab jamun is made mainly from khoya, which is what?

Milk reduced to a soft dough by slow simmering is khoya; cooks knead it with a little flour, fry the balls gently and soak them in syrup scented with cardamom and rose water.

Cannoli, fried pastry tubes filled with sweetened ricotta, come from which Italian island?

Sicily first made cannoli as a Carnival treat, and the name means 'little tubes', from the cane reeds once used to roll and shape the shells.

Panna cotta, Italy's 'cooked cream', holds its wobbly shape thanks to which setting agent?

Gelatin sets the sweetened cream without the eggs a custard needs; although Piedmont claims it as a tradition, the name panna cotta appears in no Italian cookbook before the 1960s.

What makes kulfi, the frozen dessert of the Indian subcontinent, denser than regular ice cream?

It is never churned: the milk is simmered down and frozen still in sealed moulds, so the kulfi comes out dense and melts more slowly than ice cream.

Traditional Cantonese mooncakes are filled with a paste made from what?

Lotus seed paste is the classic Cantonese filling, often wrapped around a salted duck-egg yolk that stands for the full moon when the cake is cut at the Mid-Autumn Festival.

A tres leches cake is soaked in evaporated milk, whole milk and which third milk?

Condensed milk is the third, and the cake's airy sponge is why it drinks up all that liquid without turning soggy; milk companies such as Nestlé spread the recipe by printing it on their cans.

Which syrup-soaked sweet did West Bengal and Odisha each claim, a dispute that ended with separate GI tags for both?

Rosogolla won West Bengal a GI tag, but Odisha, which cites the ritual offering of the sweet at Puri's Jagannath Temple, went on to win a tag for its own 'Odisha rasagola'.

Kagami mochi, a stacked display of two round rice cakes, is set out for which occasion?

The New Year display, whose name means 'mirror rice cake', is ritually broken up and eaten in January; it is cracked by hand or mallet, never cut, since a blade is said to recall ritual suicide.

Turkish delight, or lokum, is a confection built on a gel of sugar and what?

Starch and sugar are boiled into the gel, often scented with rosewater; confectioner Hacı Bekir, who opened his Istanbul shop in 1777, usually gets the credit, though food historians find no real evidence for it.

Panettone, the tall domed Christmas sweet bread, is most closely associated with which Italian city?

Milan's baker Angelo Motta gave panettone its tall dome in 1919 by letting the dough rise three times over almost 20 hours; emigrants later made it a Christmas staple in Peru.

Which Lenten buns is King Adolf Frederick of Sweden said to have died from overeating in 1771?

Semlor, served in hot milk as hetvägg, closed a banquet of lobster, caviar, sauerkraut and champagne; the tale gives him 14 helpings, though the story is doubted.

Sweden's Kanelbullens dag, a national day held every 4 October since 1999, celebrates which baked treat?

The cinnamon bun got its day from Kaeth Gardestedt of Sweden's Home Baking Council, who chose early October so that it would not compete with the country's other food traditions.

During the French Revolution, two nuns sheltering in Nancy famously baked and sold which almond sweets to survive?

Macarons are said to have kept the two sisters fed after the Revolution closed their convent in 1792, earning them the nickname 'Sœurs Macarons'; the ganache-filled Paris macaron came much later.

In North America and Russia, the layered puff-pastry mille-feuille is better known by which name?

The Napoleon is the same stack of puff pastry and pastry cream; one account ties its Russian fame to 1912, when triangular slices like his hat were sold for the centenary of the emperor's defeat.

The French wedding centrepiece croquembouche is a cone of choux puffs bound together with what?

Threads of caramel glue the choux puffs into a cone and harden to a brittle shell, which is the point of the name: croque en bouche, 'crunches in the mouth'.

Key lime pie probably derives from a 1931 'Magic Lemon Cream Pie' published by which dairy company?

Borden's 1931 brochure promised a 'magic' pie that sets without cooking, because the acidic juice thickens the egg yolks and tinned milk; key lime pie works by the same trick.

In 2013, which state's legislature designated pecan pie its official state pie?

Texas already had the pecan as its state tree when lawmakers honoured the pie in 2013; the dessert owes much of its fame to the makers of Karo corn syrup, who promoted the recipe.

American dairyman William Lawrence devised which cheesecake staple in the 1870s while making a French-style Neufchâtel?

Cream cheese was Lawrence's richer take on Neufchâtel, made by adding cream; from 1880 it carried the name Philadelphia, although it was made far from that city, in a village called Chester.

Sticky toffee pudding gets its moist sponge from which chopped fruit?

Dates, chopped and softened, keep the sponge moist; the Sharrow Bay hotel in the Lake District made the pudding famous in the 1970s, though a Yorkshire pub claims to have served it as early as 1907.

Eton mess is traditionally served at Eton College's annual cricket match against which school?

Harrow is Eton's opponent in the annual cricket match where the dessert is served; the school shop's 1930s version mixed strawberries or bananas with ice cream or cream, and the meringue came later.

Spotted dick, the British steamed pudding, is 'spotted' with what?

Dried fruit, usually currants or raisins, makes the 'spots'; 'dick' was simply a 19th-century dialect word for pudding, so a Huddersfield glossary of the time also lists 'treacle dick'.

Knafeh's most famous variant is named after which Palestinian city?

Nablus gives knafeh nabulsieh both its name and its filling: the city's white brined Nabulsi cheese, which turns soft and elastic when heated under the shredded pastry and syrup.

The name of halo-halo, the Philippine shaved-ice dessert, literally translates as what?

Halo-halo means 'mix-mix' in Tagalog: milk is poured over shaved ice layered with coconut, sago, jelly and fruit preserves, and the eater stirs the lot together before digging in.

An affogato is a scoop of gelato 'drowned' in what?

Espresso, poured hot over the gelato, makes the classic affogato; Italians class it as a dessert, while cafés abroad tend to list it among the drinks.

The OED's first recorded ice-cream 'Sunday', from 1892, was served in which college town?

Chester Platt's Platt & Colt pharmacy in Ithaca advertised a 'Cherry Sunday' in the Ithaca Daily Journal in April 1892; Platt later sought trademark advice, and the 'sundae' spelling may have been rivals dodging his claim.

Rocky road ice cream reportedly got its name in 1929 to give people 'something to smile about' amid what?

The Great Depression was setting in when William Dreyer, by his company's account, snipped walnuts and marshmallows into chocolate ice cream with his wife's sewing scissors and named the result Rocky Road.

The traditional pound cake takes its name from what?

A pound of each ingredient went into the original; later bakers changed the proportions and added baking powder for a lighter crumb yet kept the name, and the French version is called quatre-quarts, 'four quarters'.

Angel food cake gets its airy texture from whipped egg whites and the complete absence of what?

Fat or oil would deflate the whipped whites that are its only leavening, so even the tube pan goes ungreased, and the baked cake is left to cool inverted in its pan.

Making fudge first became a popular pastime in the 1880s at which women's college?

Vassar student Emelyn Hartridge said she gave fudge its 'real introduction' in 1888 by selling a 30-pound batch on campus; by 1896 a newspaper was calling fudges 'Vassar chocolates', cooked over gas jets at midnight.

Despite its rich taste, artisanal gelato typically contains less of which ingredient than American-style ice cream?

Butterfat is lower in gelato, which leans on milk more than cream; it also holds less air than ice cream, so each spoonful is denser and its flavours come through more strongly.

Baumkuchen, the German cake baked layer by layer on a rotating spit, is named for its resemblance to what when sliced?

Tree rings show in every slice because the batter goes onto the turning spit and browns one thin layer at a time, up to 20 in all; the name simply means 'tree cake'.

Which pastry chef developed and trademarked the Cronut, a croissant-doughnut hybrid, in 2013?

Dominique Ansel spent two months perfecting it before the launch on 10 May 2013; by the third day more than 100 people were queuing outside his bakery, and within nine days he had filed to trademark the name.

Michel Bras says his 1981 molten chocolate cake was inspired by a family warming up after what?

A ski trip: Bras watched his family thaw out over a warming chocolate drink and spent two years turning the idea into a cake, baked around a frozen ganache core that melts in the oven.

Traditional alfajores in Argentina, Peru and Uruguay are two round biscuits sandwiched with what?

Dulce de leche fills the South American sandwich; the Spanish original, born under al-Andalus, is a small cylinder of honey, nuts and spices sold mostly at Christmas.

Cassata, the Italian cake layered with ricotta and candied fruit, is wrapped in a shell of what?

Marzipan, tinted green and known as pasta reale, replaced the baked pastry case of early cassata; the change is credited to the nuns of Palermo's Martorana convent in Norman times.

Black Forest gateau is traditionally flavoured with which spirit?

Kirsch, the clear fruit brandy distilled in the Black Forest, may explain the cake's name; rival theories credit its dark chocolate shavings or the red-bobbled Bollenhut hats of local dress.

Which soft Italian cheese is whipped with eggs and sugar for the creamy layers of a tiramisu?

Mascarpone, a speciality of Lodi in Lombardy, is made by curdling cream with acid rather than rennet, so strictly speaking it is a thickened cream and not a cheese at all.

In the medieval recipe collection The Forme of Cury, the pastry case of an apple pie goes by which grim name?

A coffin, spelled 'cofyn', then meant any box or case, and the 14th-century recipe packs it with apples, spices, figs, raisins and pears.

Which US state's 1999 apple pie law asks that slices be served with cheddar, cold milk or ice cream?

Vermont made apple pie its state pie in 1999, but the serving rule has no teeth: the act asks only for a 'good faith' effort, and the statute book itself just says the state pie shall be apple pie.

Which squash shares its species with the Dickinson pumpkin, the source of most US canned pumpkin?

Butternut and the Dickinson pumpkin are both Cucurbita moschata, and the tan, oblong Dickinson looks so unlike a carving pumpkin that viral posts have claimed America's canned pumpkin is really squash.

In Spain and Latin America, crème caramel is best known by which name?

Flan is the same baked custard under its Spanish name; food historian Alan Davidson put its grip on restaurant menus down to one virtue: it can be made in bulk, well in advance.

In Venezuela, the local version of crème caramel is called quesillo, a word meaning what?

Quesillo means 'small cheese', though it contains none: Venezuelan cooks make it from eggs, milk and caramelised sugar.

In 17th-century France, profiteroles were small hollow rolls filled with what?

Savoury meats and truffles, with sweetbreads, mushrooms and game birds, filled the little hollow rolls, which could also be served in soup; the sweet choux version appeared only in the early 19th century.

Which celebrated chef, along with Jean Avice, is credited with refining choux pastry into the recipe used today?

Antoine Carême and the pâtissier Avice get the credit for the modern paste; the tale that Catherine de' Medici's Italian cooks invented it in 1540 is a later fiction.

The earliest recipe called 'trifle', in Thomas Dawson's 1585 Good Huswifes Jewell, was essentially what?

A thick flavoured cream was all it was: Dawson cooked cream gently with sugar, ginger and rosewater, grand enough for a silver bowl, and the sponge, custard and jelly came in later centuries.

Hannah Glasse's 1760 'grand trifle' recipe made its jelly from what?

Calves' feet, simmered into a rich jelly, half filled the dish; Glasse then had biscuits and macaroons stuck into it before it set and poured thick cream over the top, the first trifle known to include jelly.

Bread pudding, long a thrifty way to use up stale loaves, is also nicknamed whose pudding?

Poor man's pudding earned its name in lean kitchens: an 1847 recipe under that title skips the milk and eggs and simply pours boiling water over half a stale loaf before sweetening and baking it.

In Liverpool, a moist local bread pudding with shortcrust pastry is nicknamed what?

Wet Nelly is a moister take on Nelson squares, a bread pudding baked with shortcrust pastry, hence the name; Mexico's Lenten cousin, capirotada, shows how far the stale-bread idea travelled.

Sholezard, the Iranian rice pudding served during Muharram and Ramadan, is flavoured with rose water and what?

The Turkish sütlaç, by contrast, is browned under a broiler and dusted with cinnamon.

Henri Charpentier claimed he created crêpes Suzette by accident in Monte Carlo in 1895 while serving which future British king?

Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, was the guest in Charpentier's tale: the liqueurs caught fire by accident, the prince approved, and the dish took the name of a girl at his table; Larousse doubts a waiter of 14 served him.

A rival origin story says crêpes Suzette honour actress Suzanne Reichenberg, who served crêpes on stage where?

Reichenberg, a Comédie-Française actress known professionally as Suzette, served crêpes on stage in a play; restaurateur Monsieur Joseph of the Marivaux supposedly flambéed them to catch the audience's eye and keep them warm.

Soufflé Rothschild, named for the banking family, was first made with fruit soaked in a Danzig liqueur containing flakes of what?

Gold leaf drifts through Danziger Goldwasser, a fitting touch for a dish named after the banker James de Rothschild; later recipes swap the liqueur for cognac or other spirits.

The word soufflé is the past participle of a French verb meaning what?

To blow or puff is the sense of souffler: air beaten into the egg whites expands in the oven and lifts the dish, which is why a soufflé sinks within minutes of leaving it.

The French word mousse literally means what?

Mousse means 'foam' in French, and the word is not reserved for dessert: cooks whip air into savoury mousses too, while sweet 'crème en mousse' was in French cookbooks by 1768.

The olykoek, an early doughnut that Dutch settlers brought to America, has a name meaning what?

Oil cake is the literal meaning, since the balls of dough were fried in fat; the ring shape came later, and a recipe spelled 'dow nuts' survives in a Hertfordshire manuscript of about 1800.

Fairy bread, a children's party staple in Australia and New Zealand, is buttered white bread covered in what?

Sprinkles, known locally as hundreds and thousands, are pressed into the butter; the name, first seen for the snack in a 1929 Hobart newspaper, may come from a Robert Louis Stevenson poem.

The first known description of a cupcake, 'a light cake to bake in small cups', appeared in a 1796 book by whom?

Amelia Simmons wrote the recipe in the first cookbook by an American; the word 'cupcake' followed in 1828 and may have meant a cake measured by the cupful rather than one baked in a cup.

Which novel has Miss Maudie bake a Lane cake, the bourbon-laced Alabama layer cake, to welcome the narrator's aunt?

To Kill a Mockingbird has its young narrator grumble that Miss Maudie's Lane cake was 'so loaded with shinny it made me tight'; shinny is slang for liquor, and the boozy filling is the cake's signature.

An armadillo-shaped red velvet cake in which 1989 film helped revive the cake's popularity?

Steel Magnolias put an armadillo-shaped red velvet cake on screen and renewed interest in it; the cake had fallen from favour in the 1970s, after Red Dye No. 2 was linked to cancer and banned in the US.

Carrot cake's popularity was revived in Britain during World War II chiefly because of what?

Sugar rationing made carrots, which had long stood in for expensive sugar, the sweetener of choice, and the government was promoting carrot consumption at the same time.

Biscotti, Italy's crunchy biscuits made for dunking, take their name from Latin words meaning what?

Twice baked is the method as well as the name: the mixture is baked as a slab, sliced and baked again until dry, which is why such biscuits kept so well on long journeys.

Devil's food cake's reddish-mahogany colour comes from natural cocoa reacting with which ingredient?

Baking soda is alkaline, and the slightly acidic natural cocoa reacts with it, raising the cake and turning the crumb reddish mahogany; add more and the cake gets redder but gains a distinct aftertaste.

Pecan-topped German chocolate cake found fame through a 1957 newspaper recipe in which US city?

Dallas is where the recipe took off: a local paper printed a homemaker's version and sales of the chocolate soared; the 'German' is Samuel German, who devised that sweet baking chocolate, not the country.

Hummingbird cake, the banana-pineapple layer cake loved in the American South, was first promoted by which island's tourist board?

Jamaica's tourist board sent the recipe to American media in the late 1960s as 'Doctor Bird cake', after the island's national hummingbird; a 1978 Southern Living recipe then made it a Southern staple.

Which almond sponge, layered in a French opera cake, shares its name with the Mona Lisa's French title?

Joconde, a thin almond sponge, is brushed with coffee syrup and layered with coffee buttercream and chocolate ganache; Cyriaque Gavillon of Dalloyau claimed to have created the cake in 1955, his wife naming it after the Opéra Garnier.

A Mont Blanc dessert is made from the sweetened purée of which nut, piped into vermicelli strands?

Chestnut purée, sweetened and piped in vermicelli strands, is topped with whipped cream so that it looks like the snow-capped Alpine peak; the Paris tea room Angelina made it a signature.

The Paris-Brest choux pastry was created to commemorate what?

A bicycle race, the 1,200 km Paris–Brest–Paris, explains the ring shape: pâtissier Louis Durand is usually credited with making the choux look like a wheel at the request of the race's founder, Pierre Giffard.

Whoever finds the tiny plastic baby hidden in a New Orleans king cake is traditionally expected to do what?

Buy the next one is the rule, or else host the next Mardi Gras party; many bakers now leave the baby outside the cake for the buyer to hide, to avoid blame if someone chokes on it.

Which shell-shaped cake unlocks childhood memories in Proust's In Search of Lost Time?

Madeleine has since become a word for anything that triggers a memory; one legend credits the cake itself to a cook named Madeleine at Commercy in the 18th century.

The rum-and-vanilla canelé, with its dark caramelised crust, is a speciality of the region around which city?

Bordeaux's canelé is baked in fluted copper moulds brushed with beeswax, which gives the crust its dark caramelised shell around a soft, tender centre.

Which dessert from Limousin bakes whole, unpitted cherries under a thick batter?

Clafoutis traditionally keeps the stones in, said to lend a faint almond note and to stop the juice bleeding into the batter; made with any other fruit, the same pudding is properly called a flaugnarde.

Which Indian sweet is made by frying batter in pretzel-like coils and soaking them in sugar syrup?

Jalebi is an import by name: the word comes from the Arabic zalabiya, and its earliest Indian mention, in a Jain text of about 1450, has it served at a rich merchant's dinner.

Which crumbly sesame confection takes its name from the Arabic word for 'sweet'?

Halva crossed to America with immigrant sellers around 1900 and became a fixture of New York's Jewish delicatessens.

In 2003 which doughnut became the second official US state doughnut, after Louisiana's beignet?

The Boston cream doughnut copies Boston cream pie, already the Massachusetts state dessert, which is really a custard-filled cake named when cakes and pies were baked in the same pans.

Which immigrant community brought the yeast-risen ancestor of funnel cake to America?

The Pennsylvania Dutch brought the yeast-risen drechderkuche with them; a later baking-powder batter, poured through a funnel into hot fat, gave the fairground treat its English name.

The oldest known strudel recipe, a handwritten manuscript from the 1690s, is held in which city's library?

Vienna's city library holds the handwritten recipe, for a milk-cream strudel; the pastry itself is believed to descend from the layered sweets of the Ottoman Turks.

Which Austrian city gives its name to a lattice-topped jam tart whose recipes date back to 1653?

Linz lends its name to the Linzertorte, often called the oldest cake named after a place; in 2005 a librarian found recipes for it in a 1653 manuscript, decades older than any then known.

József Dobos designed his caramel-topped Dobos torte in the 1880s chiefly to achieve what?

A longer shelf life was the goal: Dobos wanted a cake that would keep for days without refrigeration, so he sealed the top with hard caramel, which stops the layers drying out.

The Esterházy torte, with its feathered chocolate-striped icing, is named after a princely family from which country?

Hungary's Esterházy dynasty lent the name, through the diplomat Prince Paul III Anton; Budapest confectioners created the cake, and Hungarians have since swapped its original almonds for walnuts.

Kaiserschmarrn, the shredded Austrian pancake, is named after which emperor who loved it?

Franz Joseph I is the Kaiser in the name; in one telling, his cook made the light pancake for the figure-conscious Empress Elisabeth, she turned it down, and the emperor ate her helping as well.

Pope Innocent VIII's 'Butter-Letter' allowed Saxon bakers to use butter instead of oil in which bread?

Stollen had to be made with oil under Advent fasting rules, which left the loaf hard and tasteless; after decades of appeals from Saxony's rulers, the papal Butter-Letter let bakers use butter for a fee.

Which German city, famed for its Christmas market, has given its name to EU-protected Lebkuchen since 1996?

Nuremberg had a recorded Lebkuchen baker by 1395; the city sat on the trade routes that brought in the spices its bakers needed, and it remains the best-known exporter.

Which English monarch's court produced the first documented gingerbread men?

Elizabeth I had the figures baked in the likeness of important guests and presented to them, the first documented case of gingerbread shaped like people.

Ruth Wakefield is credited with creating the chocolate chip cookie in the 1930s at which Massachusetts inn?

Toll House Inn gave the cookie its name when Nestlé printed Wakefield's recipe on its chocolate wrappers; she reportedly signed over the rights for one dollar and a lifetime supply of chocolate.

Oreo, introduced in 1912, was launched as an imitation of which earlier cream-filled chocolate cookie?

Hydrox, made by Sunshine Biscuits, came first; Oreo outsold it so thoroughly that many shoppers came to assume Hydrox was the copy.

The first Oreo biscuits were produced in 1912 at a Nabisco factory in which New York City neighbourhood?

Chelsea's old Nabisco bakery, where the first Oreos were made, is now the Chelsea Market complex, and the block of Ninth Avenue outside carries the honorary name Oreo Way.

Shortbread, the buttery biscuit baked in wedges called petticoat tails, is a traditional speciality of which country?

Scotland kept shortbread, costly in butter, for Christmas, Hogmanay and weddings; Mary, Queen of Scots is popularly credited with refining it, though evidence of any link is thin.

Makoto Hagiwara, said to be the first to serve fortune cookies in the US, ran a tea garden in which city?

San Francisco's Golden Gate Park tea garden, which Hagiwara ran, is said to have served the cookies in the early 1900s; Los Angeles disputes it, and a mock court in San Francisco ruled for the home side in 1983.

Spanish turrón and Italian torrone, both studded with toasted almonds, are forms of which confection?

Nougat's Spanish and Italian names probably go back to the Latin torrere, 'to roast', after the toasted nuts that are bound in honey and egg white.

In France's Loire region, slow-baked meringues are nicknamed 'pets', a French word meaning what?

Farts is the plain meaning of pets, a joke about how light and airy the meringues are; the nickname already appears in Lady Rachel Fane's handwritten recipe collection in the 17th century.

Marshmallow is named after a wetland plant whose root was first used by the ancient Egyptians to treat what?

Coughs and sore throats were what the root's soothing sap was for; 19th-century French confectioners then whipped it with sugar and egg whites into pâte de guimauve, at first sold as a lozenge.

In the 1950s Alex Doumak patented which process for making cylindrical marshmallows?

Extrusion pushes the whipped mixture through tubes into long ropes that are cut into cylinders; it replaced moulding in trays of cornstarch, the slower method that had first made marshmallows a mass-market sweet.

Co-inventor of machine-spun cotton candy in 1897, William Morrison practised which profession?

Dentist William Morrison of Nashville built the machine with confectioner John Wharton, and at the 1904 World's Fair the pair sold 68,655 boxes of their spun sugar.

The word sorbet comes via Turkish from sharbat, a drink word in which language?

Persian sharbat, a sweet drink whose own root is the Arabic for 'to drink', became Turkish şerbet and Italian sorbetto; English sherbet is the same word, borrowed straight from Turkish.

Agnes Marshall's 1888 recipe 'Cornet with Cream' is the earliest certain evidence of which treat?

Ice cream cone history usually starts at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, but Marshall's cornets, baked in the oven rather than pressed between irons, were in print sixteen years earlier.

Christian Kent Nelson's chocolate-coated ice cream bar, later the Eskimo Pie, was first sold under what name?

Nelson sold them as I-Scream Bars in Onawa, Iowa, in 1920 after a boy in his shop could not choose between ice cream and a chocolate bar; the Eskimo Pie name followed in 1921.

Which chocolate maker partnered with Christian Nelson in 1921 to mass-produce the Eskimo Pie?

Russell Stover's wife Clara suggested the Eskimo Pie name; the couple went on to found the boxed-chocolate company that still carries his name.

Smith Island cake, a stack of eight or more pencil-thin layers, became the official dessert of which US state in 2008?

Maryland's Smith Islanders sent the cakes out with the watermen on the autumn oyster harvest, and took to fudge icing because it held up far better than buttercream on the boats.

Lettice Bryan's 1839 cookbook holds the earliest known recipe, a 'Peach Pot Pie', for which biscuit-topped fruit dessert?

Cobbler grew out of necessity: settlers without the means for English suet puddings stewed fruit in a covered pot under a rough crust, and Bryan already wrote that her pot pie was 'often termed' a cobler.

Shoofly pie, the molasses crumb pie, is said to have begun as a crustless cake celebrating what?

The US centennial of 1876 inspired a crustless 'Centennial Cake'; baking it in a pie crust came later and made it easier to eat with the hands.

Which US state gives its name to a chocolate 'mud pie' said to resemble its muddy riverbanks?

Mississippi mud pie is younger than its Old South image suggests: mentions in print only begin in the 1970s, and it may have grown out of an earlier Southern mud cake.

Sweet potato pie is traditionally served in the American South in place of which other holiday pie?

Pumpkin pie rules Thanksgiving elsewhere, but the South bakes sweet potato instead, a habit rooted in African-American cooking, where the sweet potato stood in for the yams of the cooks' homeland.

Which Southern pantry-staple pie is said, in one tale, to take its name from a cook's drawled 'jes' pie'?

Chess pie is a classic 'desperation pie', made from cheap staples that were on hand all year when fruit was not; other theories trace the name to 'chest pie' or to English cheese tarts.

Grasshopper pie, a chilled pie on a chocolate-crumb crust, gets its green colour from which liqueur?

Crème de menthe colours it, and the name comes from the Grasshopper, an after-dinner cocktail made with the same liqueur; the pie itself goes back to the late 1950s or early 1960s.

Which Derbyshire town gives its name to a jam-and-almond pudding said to have been invented by a cook's mistake?

Bakewell's tale of a cook at the White Horse Inn spreading the almond paste over the jam by mistake around 1820 is shaky: the inn had been pulled down in 1803, and recipes were in print by the 1830s.

Battenberg cake shares its name with a princely family that anglicised it in 1917 to what?

Mountbatten is Battenberg put into English, a change made in 1917 amid wartime anti-German feeling; the cake is said to have been named for an 1884 Battenberg royal wedding.

Which ring-shaped cake pan became an American best-seller after the Tunnel of Fudge cake starred at the 1966 Pillsbury Bake-Off?

Bundt pan sales were slow until then; Nordic Ware had cast its aluminium take on the European Gugelhupf mould in 1950, and the fudge-centred cake brought Pillsbury more than 200,000 requests for the pan.

Which McVitie's snack won a 1991 tax tribunal after arguing that it goes hard when stale?

Jaffa Cakes were ruled to be cakes, which escape the VAT charged on chocolate-covered biscuits; McVitie's even baked a twelve-inch one to show that size had nothing to do with it.

Arnott's Tim Tam biscuit, launched in 1964, was named after the winner of which sporting event?

Ross Arnott attended the 1958 Kentucky Derby, won by the colt Tim Tam, and thought the name would sell; creator Ian Norris set out to better Britain's Penguin biscuit.

The no-bake Nanaimo bar, with its custard icing and chocolate top, is named after a city in which Canadian province?

British Columbia's harbour city of Nanaimo takes the bar seriously: in the mid-1980s its mayor ran a contest to find the ultimate recipe, and judges unanimously chose resident Joyce Hardcastle's.

South African malva pudding gets its distinctive flavour from which jam?

Apricot jam goes into the sponge batter with vinegar, giving its tang; a hot cream sauce is poured over after baking, and one early name was telefoenpoeding because farmers' wives swapped the recipe by phone.

The Afrikaner community of Orania has a monument to which syrupy plaited fried pastry?

Orania put up a koeksister monument in 2003 to honour the plaited, syrup-soaked pastry that Afrikaner women baked and sold to raise funds for churches and schools; the Cape Malay koesister is a coconut-rolled cousin.

Which Egyptian bread-and-milk dessert is named, by legend, after the wife of a Mamluk sultan?

Umm Ali, 'Ali's mother', was Sultan Aybak's first wife, who by legend had rival Shajar al-Durr killed in 1257 and served the dessert in celebration; it is pastry or bread baked in milk with nuts and raisins.

The carved shapes of ma'amoul, the semolina cookies of the Levant, traditionally tell an eater what?

The filling is the code: the wooden moulds differ from one filling to the next, and families bake the cookies for Easter, or a few days ahead of Eid, then keep them to serve to holiday guests.

Faloodeh, the semi-frozen Iranian dessert of fine noodles in rose-water syrup, is most associated with which city?

Shiraz gives the best-known version its name, faloodeh Shirazi; in Mughal India the dessert became falooda, a milky drink of noodles and rose syrup.

Bingsu, Korea's shaved-ice dessert, is most commonly topped with what in its patbingsu form?

Sweet red beans, or pat, give patbingsu its name; Joseon-era records already show crushed ice topped with fruit being handed out from stone ice stores, long before today's toppings arrived.

Taiyaki, the Japanese fish-shaped cake, imitates which fish, a symbol of luck?

Red sea bream, or tai, was a costly celebration fish; by one account the founder of Tokyo's Naniwaya reshaped his slow-selling round cakes in 1909 so that ordinary people could enjoy the lucky fish.

Machine-spun cotton candy reached its first big audience, at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, under which name?

Fairy Floss cost 25 cents a box, half the price of admission to the fair, and still sold in the tens of thousands; Australians keep the name today, while the British say candy floss.

Which actress, in Saint-Tropez for a 1955 film shoot, is credited with the idea of naming the tarte tropézienne?

Brigitte Bardot was in town shooting And God Created Woman when she took to Alexandre Micka's pastry and pushed him to name it; he later registered 'tarte tropézienne' as a trademark.

Which sponge-wrapped ice cream dessert did Czech émigré Ernest Velden start producing at his Eastbourne factory in 1958?

Arctic roll became a British freezer staple: in the 1980s Birds Eye sold more than 25 miles of it a month, and after being dropped it came back during the recession of 2008.

In Mexico, the thick sweet spread of slow-cooked goat's milk goes by which name?

Cajeta is said to take its name from the small wooden boxes it was once stored in; the goat's-milk sweet is tied above all to the city of Celaya, in Guanajuato.

Which New York hotel long claimed red velvet cake as its own creation?

The Waldorf-Astoria's claim spread the cake's fame: by the Adams Extract company's account, its owners ate it there and, during World War II, built a recipe around their red food colouring that went nationwide.

Why is an 1867 Paris chef said to have named his ice-cream-and-meringue dessert 'Norwegian omelette'?

He thought Bavaria was in Norway, the story goes: the dish honoured the physicist Count Rumford, who had shown in Bavaria that whipped egg white is a poor conductor of heat, which is why the ice cream survives the oven.

Anzac biscuits, the oat-and-golden-syrup favourites of Australia and New Zealand, take their name from what?

A First World War army corps, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, lent its acronym; the sweet biscuit is nothing like the soldiers' own 'Anzac tile', a hardtack so tough it stood in for bread.

Which Jewish pastry is a small crescent of rich dough rolled around nuts, jam or chocolate?

Rugelach takes its Yiddish name from a Slavic word for 'horn', after its curved shape; today's rich American dough is the newcomer, a later addition to older yeast and sour-cream versions.

What is the oldest and most traditional filling for hamantashen, the triangular pastries eaten at the Jewish festival of Purim?

Poppy seed paste, or mohn, came first; the prune version goes back to 1731, when a Bohemian plum-jam seller was cleared of poisoning a customer and his community marked his release with plum-filled pastries.

Tangyuan, the round rice balls of China's Lantern Festival, have a name that sounds like the word for what?

Reunion, tuányuán, is the near-homophone, so the dumplings stand for family togetherness and also turn up at weddings and the winter-solstice festival.

Japan's shaved-ice dessert kakigōri is mentioned in which Heian-period classic, a court lady's collection of observations?

The Pillow Book, by Sei Shōnagon, mentions shaved ice served with sweet syrup; ice cut in winter and kept in ice houses was a summer luxury that only the aristocracy could enjoy.

The three colours of hanami dango, pink, white and green, are said to represent what?

The order cherry blossoms bloom is the usual reading: pink buds, white flowers, then green leaves; the proverb 'hana yori dango', dumplings over flowers, teases picnickers who come for the food.

Which ingredient gives a snickerdoodle its signature tang and texture, distinguishing it from a sugar cookie?

Cream of tartar, an acidic powder left behind by winemaking, supplies the tang and helps raise the dough, which cracks as it bakes under its coat of cinnamon sugar.

Which Hostess snack cake was filled with banana cream until wartime shortages forced a switch to vanilla?

Twinkie inventor James Dewar wanted a year-round use for shortcake pans that sat idle out of season; vanilla stuck after the war, and banana only returned to the line-up in 2007.

Which soft drink is traditionally paired with a MoonPie as the Southern 'working man's lunch'?

RC Cola and a MoonPie, both cheap and big, made the 'working man's lunch'; Big Bill Lister's 1951 song 'Gimme an RC Cola and a Moon Pie' celebrated the pairing.

The first Pop-Tarts of 1964 lacked which now-familiar feature, added three years later?

Frosting came in 1967, once Kellogg's had an icing that could withstand the toaster; the name was a pun on Pop Art, the movement then at its height.

Post's toaster-pastry process, which spurred the creation of Pop-Tarts, was first developed for what?

Post adapted the foil-wrap process it used to keep Gaines-Burgers dog food moist, then announced Country Squares in 1964 before it was ready, letting Kellogg's beat it to market with Pop-Tarts.