One-Armed Desserts

You know it’s funny, when I first researched Andorra and looked at how big it was I for some reason read 181.550 square miles as 181,550 square miles and I thought, no way is Andorra bigger than California! I mean just look at it on a map, it’s not even as big as LA! Ha, no folks, that’s a decimal point. This is a sign that maybe I should switch my computer back over the U.S. units eh? Okay, so just to clear things up, Andorra is NOT bigger than California, in fact it’s smaller than one-sixth of Rhode Island. Yeah, I would have felt really silly if I had not corrected that mistake before typing this up.

Now aside from being tiny, Andorra is also very Spanish. Well it is squished between Spain and France so that makes perfect sense. In fact did you know that Andorrans are actually a minority there? Something really interesting about Andorra, they have the second highest life expectancy in the world, yet they don’t have free healthcare? Maybe it’s the rugged mountain air since that’s pretty much what makes up their geography.

Now I wanted to pick something relatively safe from Andorra. And by relatively safe I mean something I could bring to work and expect people to actually eat and to not throw them off my cooking for all eternity. Desserts are always a good place to start, everyone loves desserts. So I turned to my favorite resource, The World Cookbook for Students where the index mentioned a dessert called Brac de Gitano. After a quick Google search I realized Brac de Gitano, which is in Catalan (the national language of Andorra of course) translates to Gypsy’s Arm. One really interesting tidbit about Catalan, it kind of looks like a combination between French and Spanish, how incredibly fascinating. Well I never took Spanish so what do I know, but I did recognize some of the words as having French looking roots.

Okay, so I then searched for recipes for “Gyspsy’s arm” and came up with hundreds. Turns out this dessert can be found in many other countries, all adding their own spin to it. In Andorra it’s typically a white cake filled with either cream or lemon meringue. I don’t like lemons much, that variation was quickly tossed. I found a version that used apricot or peach jam, sounded like a winner. I love peaches. Now I learned some very important things when making this, oddly none of these lessons had much to do with the dish itself. First lesson, unopened cocoa powder is a bit like an unopened container of yogurt. You know how when you first open a yogurt you make sure to point it away from you? Yeah, I’m telling you right now, do the same thing for cocoa powder unless you feel like taking a bath in it. I know, as a passionate baker I’m ashamed it took me twenty-one years and a cocoa dusted shirt to realize this. Second thing I learned, rolling a half-cooled cake into a log is difficult, roll it right out of the oven to save yourself a lot of heartache. Despite these difficulties, my Gyspy’s arm was a success and it went over well at work. I can breathe a sigh of relief, I have yet to scare people away with my cooking!

I actually expected the cake to be more airy because it takes whipped egg whites like the Pavlova, but it’s actually very dense. I was not expecting that, but that isn’t a bad thing, just interesting. The very dense cake does contrast nicely with the generous amounts of whipped cream, even if I could only fit half the amount of cream into this thing, how they manage to get a cup of heavy cream into the cake is a mystery since half mine squished out the ends. Must be a gypsy trick to get it all in there.

Now why on earth is it called a Gyspy arm in the first place? There’s still some uncertainty about the exact origins, but from what I gathered it was named because it looks like an arm. I suppose I could see that, so then why gypsy? A couple people thought it was because this cake was made by gypsies to be sold, but there was still some uncertainty and not a whole lot of proof to back that up. My theory is that is was meant to be some sort of derogatory term since gypsies were not exactly welcome guests in a lot of countries. That’s just a theory though. Whatever you want to call it, this is a nice little dessert. It contains peaches and cream, how could it not go over well?