Tarta de Santiago
Tarta de Santiago — Saint James's tart, for the city the pilgrims walk to.
A flourless almond cake with nothing in it but almonds, sugar, eggs and lemon, stencilled with the cross of Saint James.
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Heat the oven to 180C and butter and line a 23 cm round tin.
Whisk the eggs and caster sugar together for 3-4 minutes until pale, thick and roughly doubled.
Fold in the lemon zest, cinnamon, almond extract and salt.
Fold in the ground almonds in three additions, stopping as soon as no dry patches remain.
Pour into the tin and level the top.
Bake for 30-35 minutes, until the top is golden and a skewer comes out with a few moist crumbs.
Cool in the tin for 15 minutes, then turn out onto a rack and leave until completely cold.
Cut a cross of Saint James from paper, lay it on the cake, dust heavily with icing sugar and lift the stencil straight up.
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Almond, unmediated. There is nothing in this cake to get between you and it — no flour to dilute, no butter to coat, no vanilla to soften — so the almond is sweet, slightly bitter at the edges and faintly floral, all at once. The sugar is assertive: at equal weight with the almonds this is a sweet cake by any standard, and the lemon zest is the only thing pulling against it. That zest does a great deal of work, cutting through the richness with a bright, oily citrus note that appears late in each mouthful. Cinnamon is a background warmth rather than a flavour you would name. The finish is long and nutty with a faint marzipan bitterness, and it is a cake that makes you want coffee.
Warm marzipan, and it fills a kitchen while it bakes in a way few things do. Toasted almond, caramelising sugar, a citrus lift from the lemon and a thread of cinnamon underneath. Cold, it is quieter and mostly almond and lemon. The almond extract is what makes the raw batter smell strongly of almond; without it the smell only arrives with the heat.
Dense, moist and slightly grainy, and the graininess is correct — this is ground almonds, not flour, and the crumb should have a perceptible texture rather than being smooth. It is somewhere between a cake and a macaroon: no crumb structure to speak of, so it does not tear so much as yield. The top has a very thin crisp crust. The whole thing gets moister over two days as the almond oil redistributes, which is why day-two cake is better than day-one.
Almost none, and the only one worth listening for is the whisk: the sound changes audibly as eggs and sugar thicken, from a thin splashing to a heavier, quieter slapping, and that change is the ribbon stage arriving. Cutting a cold one gives a soft, slightly resistant sound rather than the crumbling of a sponge.
Sugar first and immediately, then almond arriving through the middle and taking over completely. The lemon shows up late, lifting the finish and stopping the sweetness from sitting. Cinnamon is somewhere underneath and mostly registers as warmth. The finish is very long — almond oil coats the mouth — and slightly bitter in the way marzipan is, which is what stops a very sweet cake from being sickly.
Room temperature, always, and never warm. Warm, the cake is fragile and tastes flat because the almond flavour has not settled; cold from a fridge, the fat firms up and it tastes dry and dull. The hour of resting in the recipe is a minimum and overnight is better.
Coffee, and the stronger the better — an espresso against this cake is close to perfect, because the bitterness does the job the cake is missing. A small glass of sweet wine, orujo or a sherry. Fresh figs or poached pears. A spoonful of thick unsweetened yoghurt or crème fraîche, which is not traditional and is a considerable improvement for anyone who finds it too sweet. It does not want cream, which is richness on richness.
Easy, with one technique that decides everything: whisking the eggs and sugar to a proper ribbon. There is no flour and no raising agent in this cake, so every bubble of air in it was put there by that whisk, and folding it out again is the only real way to fail.
Moderate, and it is all almonds. 250g of ground almonds is the whole cost of the cake and there is nothing cheap to bulk it out with, which is exactly why it was historically a festival cake rather than an everyday one.
A 23cm round tin, an electric whisk or a stand mixer — four minutes of whisking eggs and sugar by hand is possible and unpleasant — a large bowl, a spatula, and a piece of paper for the stencil. Nothing else.
Any time. It is a festival cake by tradition and a very practical everyday one in fact, since it keeps so well.
None, though it is traditionally eaten around Saint James's day in July.
Golden on top and pulling very slightly away from the sides of the tin. A skewer should come out with a few moist crumbs on it rather than clean — a clean skewer means it is overbaked, and in an almond cake overbaking is dryness you cannot correct.
It should feel set but yielding when pressed in the centre, and it will sink a little as it cools. That sinking is normal and expected: there is no flour structure to hold it up, only egg.
Nothing raw once baked. The usual note about eggs applies to nobody here since they are cooked through.
Under-whisking the eggs and sugar, which gives a flat, dense, heavy cake — with no raising agent there is nothing else to lift it. Over-folding the almonds in, which knocks the air straight back out. Overbaking, which is very easy in an almond cake and produces dryness that no amount of syrup will fix. Cutting it warm, when it is fragile and tastes of nothing much. And dusting the cross too early, so the icing sugar dissolves into the surface.
Flat and heavy: under-whisked, or the eggs were cold, or the folding was too thorough. Domed and cracked with a wet middle: oven too hot. Dry and crumbly: overbaked, or the almond-to-sugar ratio was off. Sunk badly in the middle: this cake always sinks a little and a dramatic collapse means it came out too early. Cross has gone patchy: dusted too far ahead — brush the sugar off with a dry pastry brush and do it again just before serving.
Excellently. Bake it two days ahead and it will be better than on the day. Dust the cross within an hour of serving.
Very well, and it improves. Wrapped or in a tin at room temperature it keeps four or five days, and the flavour deepens and the texture becomes moister over the first two — the almond oil migrates through the crumb. Do not refrigerate it, which dries it and dulls the almond.
Not needed and not advisable. It is a cold cake.
Freezes well, undusted, wrapped, for three months. Thaw at room temperature and dust after thawing.
It keeps better than almost any other cake here, so leftovers are the normal state rather than a problem. Stale ends are very good crumbled over ice cream or yoghurt.
Doubles into two tins rather than one large one — a deeper cake of this batter does not cook through evenly, since there is no flour structure to support it.
Ground almonds cannot be substituted; this cake is almonds. If you grind your own from blanched whole almonds the flavour is markedly better and the texture slightly coarser, which is closer to the traditional cake. Orange zest in place of lemon is a real regional variation. There is no butter and no oil to swap, and adding either makes a different cake.
Naturally gluten-free, which is not a modification but simply what it is — worth knowing, because it is one of very few traditional European cakes that is. Not dairy-free only because of the butter for the tin, which oil or a lining of baking paper replaces. Not vegan and not adaptable: four eggs are doing all the structural work.
Ground almonds, as fresh as possible — they go rancid, and a bag that has been open in a warm cupboard for six months will taste stale in a cake that is nothing but almonds. Unwaxed lemons for the zest. If you want to be strict, the protected version specifies Spanish almond varieties, which is not something most shops let you choose.
Ground almonds are the whole cost. Buying them in a larger bag rather than a supermarket baking packet roughly halves the price. Grinding blanched whole almonds yourself is cheaper still and gives a better cake, at the cost of a food processor and two minutes — pulse rather than run continuously, or the oil comes out and you have made almond butter.
Almonds are a water-intensive crop and that is the honest footprint of this cake. Spanish and Italian almonds are generally grown with far less irrigation than Californian ones, and are also what the cake is supposed to be made of.
Around 380 calories a slice. It is high in fat from the almonds, but that fat is largely monounsaturated, and a slice carries a genuine amount of vitamin E, magnesium and about 8g of protein. It is also very high in sugar, and the two facts sit side by side honestly.
Worth it. It is one of the easiest cakes in the collection, it needs no equipment beyond a whisk, it keeps for the best part of a week and improves for two days of it, and it happens to be gluten-free without trying. The only real cost is the almonds, and there is no way round that — it is a cake made of almonds.
Galicia, in north-western Spain, and Santiago de Compostela in particular.
Tarta de Santiago in Spanish and Galician. Earlier it appears as torta real — royal cake — which is what almond cakes of this kind were called before the name attached to the city.
TAR-ta deh san-tee-AH-go.
Saint James's cake. Santiago de Compostela is the shrine of Saint James the Great and the destination of the Camino, and the cake is named for both the saint and the city.
Almonds are not a Galician crop — Galicia is wet and green and grows very little of them — so an almond cake being the emblem of Santiago says something about what the pilgrimage brought in. Almond confectionery arrived in Iberia with the Moors and travelled north; a torta real is recorded in Santiago in the sixteenth century, and a recipe recognisably this one appears in a Galician notebook of 1838. The cross of Saint James on top is the part with a firm date: it was introduced by the Casa Mora pastry shop in Santiago in 1924, as a way of marking their cakes, and became universal. In 2010 the cake was granted a protected geographical indication, which fixes a minimum almond content and restricts what else may go in.
It is the edible souvenir of one of the oldest pilgrimage routes in Europe, sold in every shop in Santiago and carried home by people who have walked several hundred miles to get it. It is also, without anybody having planned it, one of the very few traditional European cakes that a coeliac can eat, which has given it a second and entirely modern audience.
Saint James's day on 25 July, festivals, and the end of a pilgrimage. Otherwise it is an everyday cake in Galicia and a special one everywhere else.
Whisking whole eggs with sugar to a ribbon, then folding almonds in. There is no creaming, no rubbing in and no raising agent — the entire structure is aerated egg, which is why the folding is done in three additions and stopped the moment the dry patches go.
The stencil, in 1924, and very little else. Some older versions include a pastry base, which the protected specification still permits, and the cake is sold both ways in Santiago. The other change is grinding: almonds bought ready-ground are milder and finer than almonds ground at home, which is why modern recipes so often add almond extract to compensate.
With and without a shortcrust base is the main one. Beyond Galicia, similar flourless almond cakes exist across Spain, Italy and Portugal, and the differences are mostly in the citrus and the spice.
It uses almond extract, which is not traditional and is an honest correction for supermarket ground almonds. Otherwise it follows the standard proportions. It has no pastry base.
The 1924 Casa Mora stencil and the 1838 notebook recipe are the standard citations in Galician food history. The protected geographical indication is a matter of record.