The Author's Kitchen - International Baking Style Quiz

Answer: Medovik

Medovik is one of the trickier cakes out there, due to its multiple thin layers, which are sandwiched with a cream or milk filling (using smetana/sour cream or condensed milk). The filling keeps the layers moist, as they dry out in the oven. The cake can be topped off with cake crumbs or nuts. A story goes that a confectioner came up with the recipe while trying to impress Empress Elizabeth, wife of the Russian Emperor Alexander I, not knowing that she hated honey; however, she actually liked the cake.

(Pastila are fruit sweets, chakchak or çäkçäk is a pudding from the Republic of Tatarstan made from piles of deep-fried dough balls coated in honey, and kulich is an Easter bread.)

Answer: Maize

The bread in question is cornbread, made with maize flour - a staple in the Americas that has been used for millennia - and like the one shown here, it is usually baked in a skillet placed in an oven, though some variants use baking dishes. It can be eaten as a breakfast food, starter or side dish. It is a type of quick bread, meaning that it uses a chemical agent as leavening rather than a biological one like yeast, and is made with batter rather than dough.

A johnnycake is a thinner type of cornbread, with a texture more similar to a pancake, while corn pone has a thicker dough and is traditionally cooked over an open fire.

Answer: Pistachio

If you've ever eaten pistachio ice cream, you might recall that it's green in colour, like the insides of pistachio nuts. Chopped pistachio nuts, with their distinctive green colouring, are a popular filling for baklava, as well as other types of chopped nuts (such as hazelnuts or walnuts). There are many different types of baklava, but they all have one thing in common: they're made of filo pastry, soaked in honey or syrup. They can be sandwiched together with a chopped nut filling, shaped like birds' nests, or rolled into cylinders.

Greek variants of baklava are flavoured with cinnamon or cardamom, while Azerbaijani baklava, or paklava, are flavoured with cloves, cardamom or saffron, and Iranian baklava is often lighter and flavoured with rose water. Greek and Armenian baklava are traditionally made with 33 layers of dough, each representing a year of Jesus' life.

Answer: Lefse

Similar to the Irish boxty, lefse is traditionally made with potatoes, although potato-less variants exist. Mashed potatoes can be used, but riced potatoes (i.e. potatoes run through a ricer, which gives them the appearance of - you guessed it - grains of rice) are lighter and airier, and less likely to have lumps. The dough is rolled out with a special type of rolling pin that has grooves in it, and baked on a griddle. Lefse can be eaten as a savoury food, rolled up and filled with lutefisk, sausages (as an alternative to a hot dog bun) or ribberull (flattened pork ribs), or eaten as a sweet food, covered in butter, sugar or cinnamon, and/or lingonberry jam.

Of the other options, injera is Ethiopian, balep khorkun is Tibetan and khubz mulawah is from Yemen.

Answer: Christmas and New Year

Panettone hails from Milan, and is traditionally eaten at Christmas and New Year (I'm not Italian myself, but my family have had panettone at Christmas a few times, and I've still got one of the tins). Like the richer and heavier British Christmas cake, it is made over a period of days, although it is not soaked in brandy. Panettone takes a while to make because of the dough proofing process, where the dough is left to rest, giving the cake its fluffy texture. Chef Angelo Motta, who popularised the cake, came up with the technique of letting the dough rise three times.

Panettone keeps for about 4-6 months, and leftover slices from Christmas can be used to make puddings, such as bread pudding or French toast. As well as dried fruit and candied peel, it also contains lemon or orange zest, and some variants even contain chocolate.

Answer: Samosas

Samosas are a staple of Indian restaurants in the UK, and are a popular street food not only on the Indian subcontinent, but in Nepal, Ethiopia (where they are traditionally stuffed with lentils), the Maldives (where tuna is a popular filling) and the Mascarene islands (due to a large South Asian migrant population). The samosa is of Central Asian origin and was introduced to the Indian subcontinent in the 13th or 14th century by Central Asian cooks working in the royal kitchens of the Delhi Sultanate. They are triangular in shape, deep-fried and stuffed with either a mixture of meat and vegetables, or purely vegetables (such as peas or chopped potatoes), and spices.

All the other answers are Indian fried foods. Pakoras are usually made from shredded onions and potatoes; papri chaat are fried dough fritters served with boiled potatoes, chickpeas, yogurt and tamarind chutney; and aloo tikki are potato and pea fritters, similar to hash browns.

Answer: Lamington

It's unclear where the lamington got its name from, but it's thought to have been named after Lord Lamington, a former Governor of Queensland, and was thought to have been created by his French chef, Armand Galland. The story goes that Galland had to prepare food for guests at short notice, so he cut up some sponge cake, dipped the pieces in melted chocolate and rolled them in desiccated coconut, and thus the Aussie favourite was born. Some lamington variants might be sandwiched together with cream (like the one in the photo) and/or jam, or coated in jam and coconut instead. The lamington even has its own special day in Australia: 21st July.

(As for the other answers, Cressington is a ward in Liverpool, Darlington is a city in the northeast of England, and Remington is the name of an American gun company!)

Answer: Germany

Immigrants from Germany introduced multiple foods to the USA - the snickerdoodle cookie being another example - and the pretzel was one of them. They spread from Pennsylvania, where many German immigrants settled, to other cities such as Chicago and New York. They're still big in Germany today, where it's not uncommon to see giant model pretzels hanging from bakery signs; in fact, the pretzel was often used as a symbol by German bakers' guilds from the 12th century onwards. (When I went on holiday to Munich in 2016, soft pretzels were everywhere, often sliced in half and buttered like a sandwich.)

The archetypal pretzel has a twisty, knotty shape. They can be flavoured with poppy seeds, anise (in the Franconia region of Germany) or flakes of salt; sweet pretzels also exist, decorated with nuts or icing.

Answer: Matcha powder

Matcha is a type of green tea popular in east Asia, of Chinese origin. It comes from the dried and ground-up leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant, which is specially grown in shady conditions, with the bushes being covered to stop the sunlight getting in. Not only is it consumed in Japan at tea ceremonies, but it is also used to flavour foods, from ice cream and mochi (glutinous rice balls) to noodles and chocolate; the Swiss chocolate manufacturer Lindt even has matcha-flavoured Lindor balls. The matcha powder gives the cake a green colour and a slightly earthy taste.

(Ube is a type of yam popular in the Philippines, but it'll turn your food purple, not green!)

Answer: Philippines

These empanadas pictured here are Argentinian, and they are also eaten in countries such as Mexico, Peru and Chile, with a wide variety of fillings. The Peruvian variants can even be sprinkled with icing sugar! However, they can also be found in the Philippines, due to the influence of Spanish colonisation on Filipino cuisine.

Some variants have more typically South American fillings, such as potatoes, minced beef and onions, while others have more traditionally Filipino ingredients. For instance, empanadas in the Ilocos region can be filled with spicy sausage, papaya and mung beans, while sweet empanadas can be filled with bukayo (sweet coconut strips) in Cebu, or yema custard or coconut caramel in other regions.