Perfect Walnut Cake

Wow, it's been a while. But now I will stick around more often, I swear!

It seems like I've finally settled down. The past six months were crazy - I lived in many different places, more or less, from Europe to South/Central America and now I've finally settled in Canada. It was fun to don't own anything for a while, as well as having this freedom of living everywhere, but I have to admit it's good to have a place to call home.

We arrived here in Toronto in early spring, but between finding a nice place, getting my drivers license and landing in the most awesome baking internship, I barely had time to think about blogging. Shame on me, I know!

Fortunately enough, my months in Colombia and Brazil were quite fruitful in terms of baking, so there will be a lot of yummy stuff for you here in the next couple of weeks here.

Because, well, yeah, I'll be moving to Paris in about three weeks. Yeah, I know I said I've settled down but this was planned for quite some time and I won't be going from one place to another in Europe. Paris will be my home for 5 months, and then I'll be back to Canada, for good.

So until then, we'll be talking about the yummiest and sweetest things. And then some more, because I'll be at the mecca of pastries learning from the best :)

(Want to know how it's like? Check here my detailed report from the Basic Certificate I got last year!)

So, let's talk about this cake. I need to tell you about this cake.
I don't have a favorite dessert, but if you ask me to name one and just one, it has to be this cake. It tastes like childhood to me.
This was a recipe from my great-grandma, who passed to my grandma and now it's here.
The main issue is that there were many inaccurate measurements in the original recipe, so I needed to measure everything again properly, as well as improving the quality of the ingredients (like changing butter from margarine and cocoa powder from powdered chocolate).

Now I can tell you, this is one of the best things that came out of my kitchen recently.
If you don't want to make a seven-layer cake like I did, you can either use a bigger pan (I used a 7'' or 17 cm pan) or make only half the recipe.

For the filling, you can use ready-to-use dulce de leche that you can find in grocery stores, but I really recommend to cook the sweetened condensed milk cans in a pressure cooker if you have one. This way you can control how much you will cook it (I tend to like the ones that are cooked less, therefore lighter in color), but either way you'll get an awesome result.

I urge you to do this one at home, and please send me the results when you do so.
You can follow me on Instagram (@kitchenlicious) and share this walnut awesomeness with me :)