Kołocz śląski

Appearance & taste

The cake is rectangular, about 40 × 60 cm, about 3.5 cm high and weighs about 5 to 6 kg. It is available without a filling or with a filling of quark, poppy seed or apple. The yeast dough is cream-coloured, the quark filling creamy yellow, the poppy seed filling dark to graphite grey and the apple filling amber to honey-coloured. On top is golden-yellow crumble, dusted with icing sugar. Because it contains a lot of butter, it smells of butter; according to the specification, it is denser and coarser than in other regions of Poland.

Production

The yeast dough consists of wheat flour, milk, sugar, yeast, eggs, butter and salt; up to 25 % of the butter may be replaced by margarine with at least 70 % fat. The quark filling contains semi-skimmed quark, egg yolk, sugar, butter, lemon zest and flavouring, optionally raisins or custard. The poppy seed filling uses blue poppy seed, sugar, eggs, butter, water and almond flavouring, optionally with raisins, almonds, nuts or sponge crumbs. The apple filling consists of stewed apples and sugar, optionally with cinnamon, vanilla custard or grated bread roll. The crumble is made from butter, wheat flour, sugar and vanilla sugar.

In the area, the dough, filling and crumble are prepared, the dough is divided, rolled out and shaped on the tray, the layers are added, and the cake is baked and decorated. It may be sold unpackaged; the sales stand then bears one of the two names.

Origin & history

The area comprises the whole of Opole Voivodeship and districts and towns of Silesian Voivodeship, including Katowice, Gliwice, Bytom, Zabrze, Bielsko-Biała, Cieszyn, Racibórz and Rybnik. According to the specification, in other regions of Poland this cake is baked round; the name “kołocz” or “kołacz” comes from “koło”, circle.

According to the specification, the cake goes back to a 10th-century custom of baking a wedding cake that was meant to bring prosperity to the young family. It was baked by skilled housewives; there could be no draught in the kitchen, and men were not tolerated. Since the early 18th century, wedding guests in Silesia have brought the ingredients as a gift, a custom known locally as “przyczynianie się”, “poczta” or “wysłużka”. Later came “chodzenie z kołaczem”: three to four days before the wedding, a cake is brought to the guests. A legend tells that goblins from the Neisse valley showed a clever girl how to bake it.

A recipe for a “fine Silesian crumble cake, a favourite cake of our Emperor” appears in a cookbook published in Frankfurt am Main in 1913; a Breslau reader for elementary schools from 1937 contains the poem “Streuselkuchen”. Today the cake is an everyday bake, eaten in large quantities at festivals even in small towns. In August 2008, in a record attempt in Opole, a crumble cake 136.6 m long and weighing about 1,500 kg was baked.