Garash: A Bulgarian Walnut and Chocolate Cake
The year 1885 gets copied from one Bulgarian website to the next as the year the garash cake was born. Except that 1885 is when the confectioner who later came up with it first arrived in the Bulgarian town of Ruse; the first slice was cut some years after that, and nobody dares say exactly when.
Garash (Bulgarian: Гараш) is a layer cake of Bulgarian cuisine: four or five thin sheets of ground walnuts, egg whites and sugar, a dark cream of heavy cream and chocolate between them, and a glossy chocolate glaze on top. In its modern form it does without flour, which made it gluten-free long before anyone had any use for the word - the original sitting in the archive is a matter of dispute, and I'll get to that.
Who Was Kosta Garash and Why the Cake Is Named After Him
The cake's name isn't a recipe or a piece of poetry - it's a signature. Kosta Garash was a confectioner from Austria-Hungary, and that's as far as Bulgarian sources go; whether he was Hungarian, Austrian or Slovak, nobody knows. He came to Ruse with his brother Ivan and Ivan's wife Tereza and ran the Isljach chane hotel there, a short walk from the residence of Prince Alexander of Battenberg, whose table saw the Romanian, Serbian and Swedish monarchs come and go. The cake was made for guests like those. Bulgarians call it "the Bulgarian Sacher", and the comparison is more apt than they might like: the Viennese cake is named after a confectioner too, and one Bulgarian theory holds that Garash took his inspiration straight from it. Every patisserie from Sofia to Varna sells garash today, but its roots are in Ruse, where they throw a festival in its honor.
The Date of Its Invention and Twenty Grams of Flour
Garash is like most good cakes: everyone remembers the date differently. One version names a banquet on July 19, 1890, with Stefan Stambolov at the table; the Bulgarian Wikipedia sticks to a cautious "the early twentieth century"; and the only hard fact is the 1935 book by the Semerdzhievs, where the recipe first appeared in print. The more interesting argument is about twenty grams of flour: the original recipe sits in the State Archive in Ruse, and while some insist it contains no flour at all, others have found that pinch in it. If you want your garash gluten-free for certain, ask at the patisserie, not at the archive - today's recipes add the flour or leave it out depending on who wrote them.
What Garash Is Made Of and How It Looks Sliced
The main ingredient is walnuts, in a role that back home in Czechia we mostly know from the run-up to Christmas: ground, they stand in for flour and, with whipped egg whites and sugar, make sheets baked almost as thin as a wafer. With no flour, what holds the sheets together isn't gluten but the fat from the nuts and the egg white - which is why garash is dense and moist rather than airy. The filling is almost provocatively simple: heavy cream and melted chocolate, with rum or brandy in the historical versions. On top goes the chocolate glaze, which patisseries finish with crushed nuts, coconut or flaked almonds, and a slice comes out striped: pale lines of nut sheet, dark cream, a glossy top.
Garash is a patisserie cake. Nobody cuts it at weddings and no holiday calls for it; it's sold by the slice out of the display case next to kurabiiki cookies or soldiers' cookies, and Bulgarians take it along as a gift when they visit. These days patisseries also carry vegan and keto versions, which, for a recipe that had already worked around flour back in Stambolov's day, looks like a trend that showed up more than a century late.
A Slice of Cake at Kramer Patisserie
I ate my garash in Varna, at Kramer patisserie (see Where to Eat in Varna), and I walked in with a handicap: I'm more of a savory snacker than a sweet one. They brought the cake out on a white plate, the cut face striped with thin sheets and dark cream, a glossy glaze on top with a chocolate lattice. It gave way under the fork, dense and moist, and the bitterness of the chocolate played off the faint bitterness of the walnuts so well that the cake never turned cloying - and that's exactly what won me over. The slice came to about 5.95 BGN (2.80 EUR). The savory snacker surrendered. But I couldn't leave yet: their apple strudel was up next.
