Domestic Urbanite

Walnuts in my silvanas meringue

I was looking through some items online before and I have always felt frustrated with the silvannas (silvanas? sylvanas? sylvannas? whatev). There doesn’t seem to be an exact recipe for this until recently when I googled it again and reached this site. It’s more of a forum more than anything else and I would be reposting the recipe here in fear that it will get lost. The best thing though is that it seems to be a local item. Though I assume it is somewhat a transformed version of the Sansrival cake, it’s cool that only Filipino sites or forums are familiar with this, or at least on the Internet.

Another push for me to make this (finally) was the tub of icing leftover from Mom’s Honey Cake for her birthday. I for sure wouldn’t eat it by using it on breads as a spread, I had to find another way to dispose of it (and I don’t mean into the trash can). So Silvanas, it is!

Leftover yolks, walnuts, icing

So it’s basically a meringue with flour and nuts (I used walnuts in mine because I didn’t have any cashew), baked, then layered with the butter. I really don’t know how a thin a layer it should be. I’m assuming it was very thin, and it was something I couldn’t make! My meringue were all about half an inch thick! While baking, the meringue dried out soon enough and cooling it made it crunchy immediately. In my haste of drying the meringue out, I ended up burning some, but nothing a quick butter icing couldn’t solve.

As thin as I could get them

Browned (and some were blackened underneath)

I was fearing more the fact that the silvana would turn out too sweet from the butter icing, hence I made it to a stacked layers. Meringue on the bottom, icing, another meringue, and icing. No icing all over the whole thing, which I also couldn’t figure out how to do properly anyways. It was frozen immediately to  keep the butter away from the meringue, since it might get it soggy. I dusted the top with a layer of cake crumbs too.

The final judgement made me realize it’s fun to experiment, but nothing beats the original from the House of Silvanas. I for sure would make more of this at home (maybe just do a shortcut and use broas instead of baking my own meringue) but the silvanas from the original satisfies a totally different kind of food cravings

Ala macarons

Frozen silvanas

Silvanas Recipe

4 to 6 eggwhites
1 cup granulated sugar
butter icing
1/4 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup cashew nuts, pounded until powdered and then sifted
1 cup cake crumb

Pre heat oven at 200 degrees F. Beat the egg whites until stiff. Add the sugar gradually — 1 tablespoon at a time. Fold in the flour and the cashew nuts. On a greased and floured cookie sheet, press the mixture through brown paper cone in shape of an oval. Bake for 15 minutes or until lightly brown. Let cool. Spread butter icing on one cookie and cover with another. Spread a little icing on all sides and roll in cake crumbs.

Butter Icing Recipe

3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup Carnation evap milk
1 cup butter

Dissolve sugar in evap milk. Set aside. Cream butter until light and fluffy. Pour sugar-milk mixture in thin streams beating continuously until well blended.

** to shorten creaming time use 1 cup powdered sugar instead of granulated sugar.