Russian Wafer Cake

In our wanderings around town we've stumbled across a couple of Russian grocery stores. The first one we went in I saw these colorful, circle wafer things that were rather intriguing. I asked Anton what they were, and he had no idea. So when we stopped in a second store today and they had the same wafer things, I had to know. We asked the lady who worked there and she started explaining to me how to make some sort of layered dessert out of it. She pointed out the ingredients and in her broken English did her best to translate a fairly simplish recipe. I didn't have Anton to be my interpreter since he was chatting with another guy who just got into the country 10 days ago.

So armed with the ingredients handed to me by the nice lady, I went home to try my skills.

Three ingredients, piece of cake!

First I melted the butter, even though the lady just said soft butter, but I really think she wanted me to melt it.

And the reason I think that is when I opened the can of mystery stuff (Anton couldn't figure out what it was. All we knew was it was some sort of sweetened condensed milk carmely stuff.)

It was solid. Really solid. So I figured some nice hot melty butter would smooth things over. It didn't want to mix together, but I made it go.

Then because I was the cook and the photographer, there are no pictures of the next bit, but we spread some of the super thick carmely stuff on each wafer and stacked them one on top of the other.

That's the top layer there after I told Anton to start snapping pictures.

Alex was really excited to eat some cake! Anton got cutting honors.

Yummy layers.

Alex went with the peel off each layer and eat them one by one method.

Anton went with the pick up the whole pile and take a bite method.

And Ella went with the shove as much in her mouth as will possibly fit at one time method.

I just went with the eat so much it makes you feel sick method.

And the final verdict? It was okay. I think it needed some sort of creamy layer in it After we ate it I decided to look it up on the internet. I found one, count them, one website that remotely talked about this kind of treat. You can find it here. Seems like Russian things are not the most popular blogging/cooking topics. She describes various fillings I could have used in addition to the carmel we used. And it seems I should have mushed it somehow and let it sit overnight before eating it. I'll maybe give it one more shot to see if I can make something yummy out of it, and then I'll give it up as a tried it and didn't like it.