Tarta de Santiago

Description

Tarta de Santiago is a sponge cake made with eggs, almonds, and sugar, flavored with either lemon zest, grape marc, sweet wine, or brandy. Optionally, the cake can have a base layer made from puff pastry or shortcrust pastry. The earliest reference to this cake dates back to 1577, but the first recipe appeared rather late, around 1838. The imprint of the Cross of Saint James on top of the cake–made with powdered sugar–appeared first in 1924 in a cake shop in Santiago Compostela and has since become standard practice. Since 2010, the cake holds a PGI status within Europe, and in traditional Galician cake shops it is still prepared according to 19th-century recipes.