Linzer torte

The Linzer Torte (or Linzertorte) is an Austrian torte with a lattice design on top of the pastry.[1] It is named after the city of Linz, Austria. Linzer Torte is a very short, crumbly pastry made of flour, unsalted butter, egg yolks, lemon zest, cinnamon and lemon juice, and ground nuts, usually hazelnuts, but even walnuts or almonds are used, covered with a filling of redcurrant jam or, alternatively, plum butter, thick raspberry,[2] or apricot jam. It is covered by a lattice of dough strips. The dough is rolled out in very thin strips of pastry and arranged to form a criss-cross design on top of the preserves. The pastry is brushed with lightly beaten egg whites, baked, and sometimes decorated with sliced almonds. Linzer Torte is a holiday classic in the Austrian, Hungarian, Swiss, German, and Tirolean traditions, often eaten at Christmas. Linzer Torte is often made like small tarts or cookies in North American bakeries. Linzer sables (German: Linzer Augen, "Linzer eyes") are a cookie-sized version, made by cutting a circle of a similar dough, covering it with jam, placing a donut-like circle with a hole in the center piece of dough on top, and dusting with confectioner's sugar. The Linzer Torte is said to be the oldest-known cake in the world.[3] For a long time a recipe from 1696 in the Vienna Stadt- und Landesbibliothek was the oldest one known. In 2005, however, Waltraud Fai?ner, the library director of the Upper Austria

LandesMousseseum and author of the book "Wie mann die Linzer Dortten macht" ("How to make the Linzer Torte") found an even older Veronese recipe from 1653 in Codex 35/31 in the archive of Admont Abbey.[4] Besides, the invention of the Linzer Torte is subject of numerous legends, reporting on a Viennese confectioner named Linzer (as given by Alfred Polgar) or the Franconian pastry chef Johann Konrad Vogel (1796–1883), who about 1823 at Linz started the mass production of the cake that made it famous around the world. The Austrian traveller Franz Holzlhuber in the 1850s allegedly brought the Linzer Torte to Milwaukee, whence the recipe spread over the United States.[5]An egg yolk is a part of an egg which feeds the developing embryo. The egg yolk is suspended in the egg white (known alternatively as albumen or glair/glaire) by one or two spiral bands of tissue called the chalazae. Prior to fertilization, the yolk together with the germinal disc is a single cell, one of the few single cells that can be seen by the naked eye. As a food, yolks are a major source of vitamins and minerals. They contain all of the egg's fat and cholesterol, and about one-half of the protein. If left intact while cooking fried eggs, the yellow yolk surrounded by a flat blob of whites creates the distinctive sunny-side up form of the food. Mixing the two components together before frying results in the pale yellow form found in omelettes and scrambled eggs.