This year’s most festive King’s Day cake
And the winner is…
There was one clear winner, though: the lime-banana cake by Ellen Juffermans and Monique Grootveld, carefully made up to look like king Willem-Alexander’s head.
We also received various magnificent creations in red, blue, and white, as well as various submissions from international students and staff who’d researched the national holiday. One of the cakes was even submitted by three friends who met participating in UKrant and HanzeMag’s Friend-o-matic pub quiz earlier this month. That certainly put a smile on our faces.
It looks like baking is something women in particular enjoy, as we received only a single submission from a man: Rhamon Zoelman’s chocolate cake with orange fondant. We also admired the mill-shaped cake in the style of Vincent van Gogh submitted by Lara van Ravenstein and Jip van Elst, but in the end, we went for the cakes that hewed a little closer to the King’s Day theme.
The cakes that appealed the most to the jury are below. The winners will receive a voucher for dessert café TOET at the Gedempte Zuiderdiep.
1King Willem-Alexander
It wasn’t easy picking a winner from all the submissions. We had to decide what was more important: the creation’s originality, or the ingredients used? In the end, the Willem-Alexander cake scored well on both fronts. Not only do we think the king would be honoured with this likeness, which came with its own orange face mask, but the cake itself certainly sounds delicious: a lime cake with banana cream filling. It’s too bad we weren’t able to taste it, but luckily we did get the recipe.
King Willem-Alexander lime and banana cream cake
To make the banana cream:
- 250 ml of whipping cream
- 3 mashed bananas
- 1 bag of Klopfix (firming agent for the cream)
Mix the whipping cream with the Klopfix until peaks appear and carefully mix in the bananas.
To make the biscuit cake:
- 5 eggs
- 150 grams of sugar
- 1 bag of vanilla sugar (8 grams)
- 110 grams of flour
- 35 grams of cornstarch
- 1 lime, juiced and zested
Mix all ingredients and bake for 30 to 40 minutes in an oven preheated to 180 degrees Celsius.
To make the buttercream:
- 200 grams of powdered sugar
- 200 grams of butter, softened
- 2 limes, juiced and zested
Mix everything together until smooth.
Make two layers of biscuit cake with a layer of banana cream topped with slices of banana in between. Cover the whole thing in buttercream and use coloured fondant and food colouring for the design.
2Strawberry tart
Karin Stratingh made a ‘modest, but still celebratory tart’ full of subtle King’s Day allusions. It’s not just in the crown shape, but also in the ingredients used: the white chocolate ganache on the bottom has been enhanced with orange Grand Marnier and topped with a crémeux – a kind of mousse – made with strawberries – dubbed ‘summer’s kings’ in Dutch – and raspberries. The cake’s red, blue, and white decorations consist of raspberries, meringue, and blueberries.
3Dutch glory
International students Aaisha Sheth and her friends Bhanushree and Sara baked a giant carrot cake with a vanilla and cream filling, decorating it with everything that screams Dutch to them. Delft blue, Zaanish houses made out of stroopwafels (treacle waffles), and of course, oranges. We hope they have plenty of roommates to help them eat it!
Motivational award
Another year, another motivational award, this time for I.F. Willemstein, who only knew one thing about King’s Day: it’s when everyone drinks beer! So they made a lemon and poppyseed cake in the shape of a mug of foaming beer, including a floating can of Heineken. We love it.
We would like to thank all the other participants in the baking competition. If you’re interested in the submissions we received, you can check a selection of them out below.