Best of Budapest & Hungary

Sugar Design Confectionery's blackcurrant-tonka bean-black sesame cake has been named this year's dessert of Budapest, and can be tasted for the first time at the Sweet Days Budapest chocolate and sweets festival from Friday to Sunday.

    The Sweet Days is one of Europe's largest chocolate and confectionery-themed trade fairs, with more than forty exhibitors' sweets on display in front of St Stephen's Basilica, said Csaba Rebrus Csaba, president of the Hungarian Chocolate and Confectionery Association (Csésze) and the main organizer of the Sweet Days, at a press conference in Budapest on Tuesday.

    The most important objective of the event is to help Hungarian confectioners and confectionery manufacturers to become stronger and more popular. Their intention is to strengthen the culture of quality confectionery consumption and to focus on special domestic products in addition to mass-produced goods, he noted.

    The Budapest Dessert of Confectionery competition also contributes to this goal. "We cannot accept that Hungarian desserts should disappear from the menus of restaurants," the organizer said.

    Csaba Rebrus stressed that the judging was anonymous, and the judges only knew the winner after the scores had been tallied.

    The cake selected by the jury traditionally debuts at the Sweet Days every year, so the makers can get immediate feedback from consumers, he added.

    Eszter Horváth, owner of Sugar Design Confectionery, said that the two must-have ingredients chosen by the 2022 winner of the confectionery competition this year were blackcurrants and tonka beans.

   Their cake is made up of a blackcurrant sponge cake on the bottom, filled with blackcurrant soft jelly, topped with a blueberry blackcurrant mousse with tonka bean, Belgian dark chocolate ganache and crunchy croquant praline. "As blackcurrants are a very aromatic and acidic fruit, they are paired with blueberries, which go very well with tonka beans," she said.

    He added that he and Sugar's head pastry chef Orsolya Vaslóczki first tasted blackcurrant cake in Japan and immediately fell in love with the taste. Sesame harmonizes well with acidic fruits, which is why they chose it for the sponge cake, which was made with toasted black sesame instead of flour, making it gluten-free.

    Eszter Horváth highlighted the special organic dark chocolate used for the dessert, which contains 65% cocoa, is made from cocoa beans grown among tamarind trees in the north of Madagascar and has a unique fruity flavor.