Laskonky

Two thin oval shells, baked to a pale color, sandwich a cream. Laskonky from Czechia and Slovakia are meringue sandwich sweets made by folding almonds, walnuts, coconut or similar ingredients into whipped egg whites. The dry meringue shell crumbles lightly, and then the butter cream spreads across the palate. The variations lie not only in the nuts or coconut mixed into the shells but also in how whipped egg whites or milk are used in the cream. A single piece is called a laskonka, and laskonky is the plural.

Laskonky decorated with chocolate. Vysočina Region, Czechia, 2019 (Photo: Jiří Zelenka / Pohled 111 / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Baking meringue with nuts or coconut into thin ovals

One recipe (the proportions of ingredients and the method) from a Slovak baking competition boils a sugar syrup to about 114°C, pours it into egg whites, and whips them thoroughly. Powdered sugar and ground almonds are added, and the mixture is spread thinly and evenly into an oval stencil. When the stencil is lifted, the same shape remains. Unlike cutting a flour-based dough with a cutter, the shape is formed by spreading whipped egg whites with ground nuts mixed in across the openings cut into a board.

Recipes that dry the shells for a long time at a low temperature of around 100–110°C reduce their moisture without giving them a deep color. Even once dry enough to lift, the shells break easily, so they are handled only after cooling. Pastry shops sell everything from bite-sized pieces to slightly larger ones, with the layers of thin shell and cream visible along the sides as well.

With coconut, white fibrous shreds are visible, and the pieces remain when you bite into them. With almonds, pale fine particles and the flavor of nut oils are added. Even with the same oval shape, the ingredient folded into the foam changes the surface and aroma of the baked shell.

Laskonky made in a small size. Location unknown, 2020 (Photo: Jiří Zelenka / Pohled 111 / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Using walnuts in both the meringue and the cream

In the method of Slovak pastry maker Veronika Bušová, ground walnuts are mixed into the meringue shell. Egg whites and sugar are warmed over a water bath and whipped once the sugar has dissolved, then combined with powdered sugar and walnuts and spread into a template. The order in which sugar is combined with the egg whites differs from methods that pour in hot syrup. The shells are baked in two stages, first at about 120°C and then at about 80°C to dry, producing thin shells that can be peeled off the paper.

The same walnuts are coated in caramel. Once cooled, half is made into a grillage that keeps its pieces, and the rest is ground until the oil is released and it becomes smooth. This paste is combined with a cooled custard of eggs and milk and with whipped butter, and finally the pieces are mixed in. The finely ground nuts spread their flavor throughout the cream, while the crushed nuts leave a bite within it. This method uses walnuts in both the shell and the filling, and the cream offers both a smooth paste and crunchy pieces.

Combining butter with an egg-yolk and milk custard

In one method that uses an almond meringue shell, a custard of milk and egg yolks is cooled and combined with butter, and then hazelnut grillage is added. Setting the nuts in caramel, then cooling and crushing them, is done separately from cooking the custard.

Sugar-coated nut pieces in the smooth buttercream add toastiness and crunch to the sweetness of the meringue. The temperature and firmness of each component are adjusted before assembly so that the cream can be sandwiched at a suitable thickness between the two dry shells.

Buttercreams made with caramelized condensed milk or meringue

The coconut version made by the Erhart pastry shop in Czechia combines butter with caramelized sweetened condensed milk. Its meringue shells are not spread with a stencil but piped into ovals with a piping bag and dried in an oven with the door slightly open. Both the ingredients and the shaping differ from methods that sandwich a cooked milk-and-egg-yolk custard between stencil-formed shells.

Another method using an almond meringue shell combines whipped butter with a meringue made by pouring hot syrup into egg whites. Crushed almond grillage is mixed in and also pressed onto the exposed sides of the cream. Egg-yolk custard, caramelized condensed milk and egg-white meringue are all ingredients for the cream that joins the two oval shells, but each changes the sweetness and lightness in its own way. Whether the meringue shells are spread or piped, and which nuts are added, also change the texture of each piece.

Some recipes add a small amount of wheat flour. In a 2012 example actually made on the cooking blog “Slovak Cooking,” flour is mixed into the almond meringue. For the filling, too, it uses a method in which flour dissolved in water is added to caramel, cooled, and combined with butter and other ingredients. Besides creams made by cooking egg yolks and milk, some are thickened with water and flour. The name laskonky alone does not uniformly determine whether flour is used or what the filling contains.

The name laskonka in a novel and in dictionaries

In the 1975 Czech novel Odměna, there is a scene in which a character stops at a pastry shop and opens a sealed letter with a Viennese-style coffee and a laskonka in front of them. The name of this small sweet of two shells joined with cream also appeared in the coffee breaks of town life. A 1979 Slovak dictionary of foreign words defined it as “a delicate, sweet confection,” and a 1997 concise dictionary of Slovak explained the name through its structure of two egg-white shells joined with cream.

An etymological theory linked to the Spanish word for “shell”

There are several theories about the origin of the name laskonky. In 2010, Slovak linguist Ľubor Králik proposed a hypothesis likening the two ovals to shells. In Spanish, concha means “shell,” and its plural with the definite article, las conchas, means “the shells.” He considers two possibilities: that a form pronounced close to “las conchas” changed to a Slovak ending as it was passed along, or that the sound changed when someone read a printed recipe.

He also stated this theory in a 2016 interview, but no corresponding Spanish sweet or route by which the name was transmitted has been identified. There are also explanations that link the sound of the name to love or tenderness, and the shell theory is likewise only one of these explanations.

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