Uzhhorod Cake Mini-Sculpture

Three discs of hazelnut meringue, a mousse built on condensed milk, butter and cream, no flour anywhere in it, 410 grams to the box, and the Holy Cross Cathedral rendered across the top. That is the Uzhhorod cake, and on 27 September 2021 the city gave it a monument.

Roman Murnyk's bronze sits on the corner of vul. Voloshyna and Teatralna Square, outside the biology faculty of Uzhhorod National University. The date was picked to do three jobs at once: the cake's tenth birthday, World Tourism Day, and the Exaltation of the Holy Cross — the feast the cathedral on the cake is named for.

An answer to the Kyiv cake

The recipe began as a criticism. Zakarpattian confectioners wanted a lighter reply to the Kyiv cake, the Soviet-era standard, and arrived at a meringue base of egg white, sugar, starch and hazelnut, with nothing to weigh it down. The formula has not moved since 2010. The mousse has never been published.

Authorship is a family matter and an unsettled one. Valentyn Shtefanyo is generally credited as the creator; his sister Valentyna, also a confectioner, maintains that the variants of the cake were her work. He acknowledges what she did and says the cake he sells is the one he developed himself.

Why you have to eat it here

In 2017 Shtefanyo capped production and confined official sales to Zakarpattia, on the reasoning that he could not vouch for what happened to the cake past the regional border. The decision cost him a national market and imitations appeared everywhere else almost at once. His personal phone number is printed on the box: complaints go straight to him.

The volumes were never small. By 2015 the workshop was turning out something like six thousand cakes a month, most of them for buyers who live within an hour of it.

Find the bronze, then find the cake

The corner is student territory and busy for most of the day, so the miniature is easy to spot once you know to look down rather than up. Uzhhorod has been installing these since the early 2010s, and nearly all of them commemorate a person — a writer, a musician, an empress. This one commemorates a pudding, which is a fair summary of the city's priorities.

Having found it, go and buy a slice; it is sold in the confectioner's own shops and in supermarkets across the region. Order it with coffee and sit down with it. Nobody here eats this standing up.