My great-aunt, Teta Ole, helped raise my mother, who lost her own mother at an early age. Teta Ole helped move the family from Lithuania at the end of WWII to the displaced persons camps in Germany, then eventually settled in Pittsburg, PA with her 2 brothers and her younger brother's daughter, my mother. She worked for years as a seamstress, in a factory making vestments for priests. I learned many recipes and techniques from her (canning/preserving, saving everything - why buy potato starch when you can collect your own after grating potatoes?, improvising), although I was always hopeless at sewing. One of my favorite of her recipes is this torte, which she used to make when we were coming to visit. It's delicious and surprisingly light - and freezes well so you can be ready for your guests ahead of time. I've translated this recipe from her hand-written recipe card (in Lithuanian), and added some more instructions, since the original was fairly bare-bones. <br /> <br />It's also easily made gluten-free: just substitute an all-purpose gluten free flour 1:1 for the regular flour in the crust - you don't even need a binding agent because it's supposed to be fairly crumbly. I prefer blends without bean flours in them for this purpose. <br /> <br />Finally, if you want a really impressive-looking cake that feeds a crowd, bump up the filling to 1.5x the ingredients, and bake slightly longer - start checking it at 45 min.

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