Spice & butter cake

A colonial Dutch contrivance, still enormously popular in Netherlands restaurants, is the rijsttafel or ‘rice table’. The rice in question is served with a parade of dozens of small plates of Indonesian food, a take on a nasi padang feast. It is typically rounded off by slices of richly spiced spekuk. This Indo-Dutch cake is made by layering and grilling twenty or more alternating dark and light layers. Beautiful as it looks, I don’t have the patience for such matters.