Kartoshka

Kartoshka is a sweet made by finely crumbling sponge cake or similar ingredients, combining the crumbs with cream and shaping the mixture like a potato. Coated in cocoa, it looks like a small potato still covered in soil. White cream is sometimes piped onto the brown, cocoa-dusted surface to represent sprouts.

A sweet made from sponge cake crumbs

Pieces of sponge cake are crumbled finely and mixed with buttercream. Rum or brandy may be added for flavor, depending on taste. Once the mixture holds together, it is shaped into small ovals and dusted with cocoa and powdered sugar. The cream binds the dry sponge crumbs, and when the sweets are chilled, the butter firms up so that they hold their shape. In the mouth, the slight bitterness of the surface is followed by the moist crumb and the flavors of milk and butter.

In versions made with white sponge and dusted with cocoa only on the outside, the inside is light in color when broken open. Some versions also mix cocoa into the mixture itself, and some home recipes crush cookies or rusks and bind them with sweetened condensed milk and butter. Sponge can also be baked specially for the purpose, and the choice of what is crumbled changes the texture of the crumbs and the aroma.

Shaping potatoes and adding decorations

Some versions make use of the small potato shape and decorate it with a hedgehog’s face and spines. Giving the shaped sweets a face lets the same mixture take on a different appearance.

Confectionery workshops and home kitchens

When cakes are trimmed into neat shapes, the edges of the sponge are left over. Robert Kengis’s 1960 confectionery book includes a recette (a set of ingredient proportions and method) in which sponge crumbs are pressed through a sieve, mixed with cream and shaped like potatoes. The sweets are dusted with cocoa and powdered sugar, small indentations are made in the surface, and white cream is piped on to represent sprouts. The book notes that offcuts left from cutting confections and cakes can also be added. Another recipe for home cooks used readily available biscuits or rusks. The word “potato” in the name describes the shape and does not refer to an ingredient of the usual mixture.

The cook Dariya Chernenko has written about a childhood memory: her father ground rusks, she mixed the dough together with her mother, and the family rolled it into shapes and dusted them with cocoa and powdered sugar. Today she makes the sweet, which they decorated with walnuts and chilled until set, together with her daughter.

The idea of binding crumbled confections back together is also shared by muraveinik, which is piled into a mound. Kartoshka, by contrast, is shaped into potatoes one at a time by hand.

Glossary