A cake and a glass of birch sap (or a milkshake) in the nearest cafeteria or cookery - a snack (well, or delicious entertainment) for many of my peers-peers was even more than available in “hungry Soviet times ".
Oddly enough, the cakes were often really tasty. There were not so many tots (as for my taste), but everything is ok with cakes in any store. Now they are scolded and spat in their direction, they say, there was no civilized cheesecakes and tiramisu in the assortment, everything is plebeian, a lot of dough, a lot of fatty cream, but for such activists I have one incomprehensible for them, but a weighty argument: a confectionery fashion.
Cooking, like any branch of art, is developing all the time. And there are fashion trends in it. Fatty butter and butter creams are a hallmark of twentieth-century desserts. Even the Pavlova meringue cake started with whipped cream, and this, you know, although not butter, but natural whipped cream is not a dietary product at all... Then the fashion for desserts changed. Now more and more emphasis is placed on lightness, although the lightness of the cream does not always suit all desserts: there are eternally relevant "heavyweights" in which a light cream is a perversion (take at least the legendary "Opera").
Well, okay, back to my childhood favorite cakes
In the first place, I probably always had a biscuit triangle. The funny thing is that in different cities of the USSR it was called differently. Somewhere it was a "corner" cake, somewhere "Napoleon" (although there was no smell of Napoleon), and somewhere it was biscuit.
White biscuit cakes, soaked in syrup, sandwiched with vanilla butter, and sprinkled with vanilla crumbs on top of the cake. It went especially well with a milkshake (the syrup in the crust echoed the syrup in the cocktail) or with a cup of coffee, which was then brewed in all shop cafes, in coffee machines.
In second place is the Jelly cake.
Rhombus made of biscuit cakes, sandwiched with jam and a little cream, with a top layer of jelly. I don't know why, but "Jelly" was not baked everywhere - it was more often found in the cities of the Ukrainian SSR than in Moscow.
Pastry "Zavarnoe" - third place.
Now it is stubbornly called eclair, but at the time of my childhood, the cake was exactly "Zavarny". Eclairs then were mostly called other cakes - round. And the elongated ones are "Custard".
The cream in such cakes was quite fatty, buttery (just butter, not margarine), and it was best eaten with a glass of tea or a cup of coffee.
Fourth place — our Moscow specialty, one might say, are shortbread cakes from the confectionery at the Prague restaurant. They were made in the form of stripes, with filling (but the filling is vaguely remembered), decorated with thin strips of chocolate glaze on top - across and obliquely.
Such shortbread cakes were rarely obtained, because it was necessary to go for them, but they were very, very delicious (like "Napoleons" from the same confectionery, and fruit biscuit pies with syrup impregnation).
Fifth place — puff tubes, of course. With whipped cream topped with crushed nuts, or butter cream, it makes no difference. Back in the days when creams were cooked in butter rather than margarine, they were equally delicious.
Sixth place - Mriya cake. Dream, translated from Ukrainian.
These pastries came across to me only once in my childhood, during a trip to Ukraine. The body of the cake was made of custard and had a rounded shape. imagine a healthy eclair so!
The filling was sour, but with a chocolate tint. Apparently, grated cottage cheese and cream were used to make the cream - the consistency of the filling now suggests this idea. Then I did not think - delicious and that's it.
But the icing was different from time to time - white chocolate, or even pink once.
And what cakes did you like the most in childhood Soviet times?