In 2017 Hungary's agriculture minister wrote a cake into the national food codex. A decree says that a real Dobostorta is round, has five thin sponge layers with chocolate buttercream between them, layers and cream of nearly equal thickness, and a top of golden-brown caramelized sugar. That's a lot of rules for a dessert, and it makes sense once you know that this cake was one of the first food brands of an empire that no longer exists. If you grew up in Serbia, Croatia or Slovenia you probably ate žerbo, griljaž torta, Dobos and krempita at every birthday and never asked why the names sound Hungarian and German. Here's the short version: the cakes came from two capitals, Vienna and Budapest, and a few confectioners made them famous.
One Empire, One Cake Table
From 1867 to 1918 Vienna and Budapest were the two capitals of Austria-Hungary , a state that stretched from the Alps to the Carpathians and down to the Adriatic coast. Today its territory is split between more than a dozen countries, and the cakes are still split between them too. The coffeehouse (Kaffeehaus in German, kávéház in Hungarian) was where a clerk or a countess could sit for hours over one coffee, and the confectioner's shop next door (Konditorei, cukrászda) was the place that supplied the cakes. In Serbian that shop is a poslastičarnica, a word every Serbian reader knows and nobody thinks of as foreign anymore.
The confectioners were mobile. Henrik Kugler, who ran a famous Budapest shop, learned his trade as a journeyman in eleven European capitals including Paris, and in 1884 he brought a Swiss-born confectioner who had worked in Germany, England and France to Budapest to be his partner. That man is Emil Gerbeaud, and his story is coming up. A chef who carried a cream cake from Vojvodina to Slovenia in 1953 is another example. Recipes, techniques and cake names traveled with people, and a good cake got copied from one city to the next.
One note before we eat. Most of these cakes have an origin story, and most of the stories have a legend wrapped around a smaller fact. I'll say which is which. The most famous of them all, the Sachertorte, already has its own post: Sachertorte: Vienna's famous cake, its story and recipe. This post is about everything else on the table.
Dobos Torte: The Cake That Could Be Shipped
József C. Dobos (1847 to 1924) was a Budapest delicatessen owner who wanted a cake that would stay fresh in an age without proper refrigeration. His answer was a sponge cake with a hard caramel top, which seals the cake the way a lid seals a jar, and a chocolate buttercream, which keeps better than the cooked custard and whipped cream that most cakes were filled with then. He introduced it at the 1885 National General Exhibition of Budapest, where Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth were among the first to taste it. The Hungarian article says he created it in 1884 and showed it to the public in 1885, so the two years are really one story.
Dobos then did something clever: he traveled around Europe to show the cake off, and he shipped it in specially built wooden boxes. Other confectioners tried to copy it without knowing the recipe, and he kept it secret until he retired in 1906, when he gave it to the Budapest confectioners' guild so that any member could use it. A story you'll hear in Hungary says the buttercream was an accident, and that a boy churning butter put sugar into the churn instead of salt. Treat that one as tradition, not record. What is certain is that cakes of the day were filled with cooked custards and whipped cream, so a chocolate buttercream stood out.
More than a hundred variations of the recipe are known, and the 2017 decree says which one may be sold as a Dobos.
Esterházy Torte: Which Esterházy?
The Esterházy torte has no pale sponge layers. It's built from four or five layers of nut meringue, almond in the original and walnut in Hungary today, held together with cognac or vanilla buttercream and iced with white fondant. The brown chocolate lines drawn across the top and dragged into a web are its signature. Everything is sweet, heavy and crumbly in the best way, and it was a favorite of the whole Monarchy by the late 19th century.
The name is the interesting part. The English article says it honors Prince Paul III Anton Esterházy (1786 to 1866), an Austrian diplomat. The Hungarian article is more careful: it says the cake was named after an Esterházy prince who loved it, notes that sources mention both Paul Anton and Miklós József, and adds that it could just as well have been the whole family's favorite. It also says the cake wasn't named after its maker, who could have been a Viennese or a Pest confectioner. So the honest answer to "which Esterházy" is that nobody knows, and the same goes for "Vienna or Budapest".
Žerbo: A Swiss Confectioner and a Possibly Borrowed Name
Žerbo is the one that gets cut into small squares and put on a party platter. In Hungary it's zserbó, where it's also a Christmas sweet. Thin layers of dough hold apricot jam and ground walnuts, and the top is covered in chocolate. The name comes from Emil Gerbeaud, born in 1854 in Carouge near Geneva, who came to Budapest in 1884 at Henrik Kugler's invitation. He took over Kugler's shop piece by piece, and Café Gerbeaud on Vörösmarty Square still carries both names, and still says its story began with Kugler in 1858.
Did Gerbeaud invent the cake? Probably not, and the evidence is nicely detailed. The Hungarian article on zserbó says the tradition credits him, but his shop's price lists don't mention the cake, and the first cookbooks that do appear in the 1950s. The cake became truly popular after the shop was nationalized in 1948, and one theory ties it to the 1958 Brussels World Fair. The English biography says the cake is named after him but wasn't available in his lifetime. So the name is a tribute, or a label that stuck, and the cake may well have been invented after he died in 1919. That doesn't make the cake any less Hungarian. It just means the famous confectioner's name got attached to it, and the spelling žerbo is what happens when a French surname travels through Hungarian to Serbian.
Krempita, Kremšnita, Krémes: One Idea, Many Countries
If you want to see a cake turn into a dozen cakes, look at the cremeschnitte. Puff pastry, vanilla custard, sometimes whipped cream, a dusting of sugar. It has a separate name in nearly every language of the former empire: Cremeschnitte in German, krémes in Hungarian, krémeš in Czech and Slovak, kremna rezina or kremšnita in Slovenian, kremšnita or krempita in Croatian and krempita in Bosnian and Serbian. The ancestor is French, the mille-feuille, and the Austro-Hungarian cooks made it thicker, softer and easier to cut.
The Bled cream cake is the famous one. The Hotel Park in Bled began making it in 1953, brought by the hotel's confectionery chef Ištvan Lukačević, who came from Vojvodina where a similar cake was already known. By 2009 the hotel had baked 10 million of them. In Croatia there are two local versions: the Samobor kremšnita has a puff pastry top and a mostly custard filling with meringue, and the Zagreb one has chocolate icing. The classic Samobor recipe is credited to Đuro Lukačić in the early 1950s. Same family, different tops, and each town will tell you theirs is the only real one.
More From the Same Table: Rigó Jancsi, Linzer, Punschkrapfen
Rigó Jancsi is a cube of chocolate sponge, chocolate cream and a thin layer of apricot jam under a dark glaze. It's named after a Romani violinist (1858 to 1927) who in 1896 met Clara Ward, the wife of a Belgian prince, while he was playing at a restaurant in Paris. Between 1896 and 1898 the newspapers wrote extensively about his marriage to her. The cake is said to celebrate that love story, but the sources disagree on who made it first. Maybe the violinist did, maybe a confectioner named it afterward, so the romance is the part to enjoy and not to cite.
The Linzer torte is much older than any of the Budapest cakes. It's a crumbly pastry with nuts, spices and red fruit preserves under a lattice, and it's been described as the oldest cake named after a place. For a long time the earliest known recipe was from 1696, until a 1653 recipe turned up in the archive of Admont Abbey in 2005. Its invention has several legends, including a Viennese confectioner named Linzer, and none is documented. The Punschkrapfen is the pink one: rum-soaked sponge crumbs, nougat and apricot jam under a pink rum glaze. Its origin is disputed too. Some say Ottoman soldiers brought it to Vienna, and some say a court confectioner invented it.
Griljaž, Reform and Vasina: The Cakes That Only Look Imperial
The photo above shows Vasina torta, a walnut cake from the same Serbian family, because no free photo of griljaž exists. Griljaž torta (also written grilijaš) is the one the whole region argues about and nobody can date. The name comes from a candy: grilijaš is caramelized sugar with chopped nuts, usually walnuts. A typical Serbian home recipe grinds 100 grams of walnuts with 80 grams of caramelized sugar into the sponge, and more of it goes on top. Beyond that, it gets vague. There's no documented inventor, year or city to point to, only recipes that call it old-fashioned. So the honest answer is that it's a Central European tradition of nut-and-caramel cakes, and whether this exact one was first made in Vienna, Budapest, Zagreb or Belgrade is unknown. If someone gives you a confident date, ask for the source.
Two others are even more local. Reform torta (walnut meringue layers with a cooked egg-yolk and butter filling) has an unclear origin even in Serbian sources. The popular theory ties the name to the socialist reforms in Yugoslavia after the Second World War, when eggs became more affordable, but the same article points out the problem: a recipe for it already appears in cookbooks from the 1920s and 1930s. So the name's origin is open, and the Viennese-style egg-yolk filling is the clue that the technique is older than Yugoslavia. The Vasina torta has a legend instead of a paper trail. A walnut base soaked with orange juice, a walnut and milk filling and a cooked egg-white topping, it's said to come from Paraćin in the early 1900s. The merchant Vasa Čokrljan took his wife to Vienna for a dangerous pregnancy, the doctors saved her and the baby, and her grateful mother created the cake for him. It's a lovely story and that's all it is, since it comes from legend and not from a document.
So why are they alike, yet different? They share a toolbox, not a recipe. Sponge or nut meringue, buttercream or custard, caramel, walnuts, apricot jam: the confectioners of Vienna and Budapest combined them in different ways, journeymen carried the methods from city to city, and a hit like the Dobos got copied everywhere. After 1918 the borders moved and the cukrászda stayed. Serbian kitchens kept leaning on walnuts, as Reform, Vasina and griljaž show, and that is how a cake with a French surname and a cake with no author end up on one birthday table.
Where to Taste the Empire Today
The easiest way to try the originals is to go to the source. In Budapest, Gerbeaud at Vörösmarty Square 7-8 is the place to start (it's usually open daily, with hours on its site), but the Ruszwurm in the Castle District dates from 1827 and kept its Biedermeier interior through two sieges, but it closed in August 2025 after a long legal fight with the district, and the municipality planned to tender the premises to a new operator. No reopening has been announced that I could find, so don't plan a trip around it without checking. In Vienna, Demel on Kohlmarkt has been making cakes since 1786 and was an imperial and royal court confectioner, and Café Central on Herrengasse opened in 1876, but it has been closed for renovation since March 2026 and is due to reopen in winter 2026, so check its site first. Our guides 5 Days in Budapest and 5 Days in Vienna have the rest of those cities.
You don't have to go to the capitals, though. The cream cake lives in Bled, and the poslastičarnice of Novi Sad and Belgrade are where most Serbian readers will start. Zagreb, Prague and Bratislava have their own versions too, in the guides to Zagreb, Prague and Bratislava. The Danube runs through or near most of this territory, and the river from source to delta is a decent map of where the empire's kitchens were. For the countries, see Austria, Hungary, Serbia and Croatia. The empire ended in 1918, but its cake table is still set.
