Drunken Franciscan (source: Sme - Marko Erd)
It comes in many versions – as a large cake or cupcakes, and as gluten-free and even unbaked. It was also baked on the show Pečie Celé Slovensko, the Slovak version of The Great British Bake Off. The popular Opitý Františkán (Drunken Franciscan), also known as Opitý Izidor (Drunken Isidore), was part of the festive table in many families across Slovakia.
Our family was no different: my mother baked it for Christmas and Easter. I have always remembered this luscious cocoa cake with apricots and nutty-rum filling from my childhood, but I did not know how it came to us. All I knew was that it was not one of the recipes “inherited” from my grandparents.
“Once, in a doctor’s waiting room, I overheard a slightly chubby little girl saying she hadn’t eaten anything but one bite of Drunken Franciscan. It occurred to me what a tasty cake it must have been if she couldn’t resist it,” my 86-year-old mother recalls.
By coincidence, some weeks later her colleague Evička brought the cake’s recipe to their workplace, to share it. Typed out using a manual typewriter, it ended up stuck in a large notebook among my mother’s other recipes.
My mom used to bake Františkán, as we called it, for years, using boiled apricots from our garden. Today, only the stump of the apricot tree remains, after the wind broke off its crown a few years ago. My brother and I left home and started our own families. Mom stopped preparing the iconic cake. But over the last few years, no matter how many cookies and cakes I brought to her house for Christmas, she couldn’t help reminding us that “the Františkán was still the best”. So, this year I resolved to dust off the family tradition and bake it.
