That's an excellent question (thanks, Christine G.), since the various distinctions between cakes, layer cakes, tortes and gâteaux are rarely discussed in the popular food press, or dare I say, even in most pastry departments. Most people simply assume that they're just different words that different cultures use for the same things, which isn't the case. The distinctions between them are often fine, but they are real and worth noting. Not having an authoritative guide to this topic at my disposal, I'll do my best to provide descriptions.

Classically, cakes are single-layered affairs. Usually round and almost always flat, their primary ingredient is most often some sort of grain flour (wheat, oats, barley or the like). They can be sweetened (with sugar or honey), enriched (with eggs and/or butter) or leavened (with yeast or chemicals).

Layer cakes are the same thing as cakes, only stacked on top of one another, then filled and iced. Compared to cakes, which are a mostly Old World thing, layer cakes are a mostly New World thing. They're almost always leavened with chemical agents.

Gâteaux have more in common with pastries than they do cakes, since they're composed of layers. Their foundation is usually egg foam-and-flour sponge cake, sometimes supplemented with ground nuts. The layers of filling in a gâteau — creams, jams, fruits or mousses — are usually quite thick, sometimes thicker than the baked layers that support them.

Tortes are similar to gâteaux in that they typically rely on a sponge of some sort for support. The difference, in my experience anyway, is that they tend not to be as tall or as amply filled as gâteaux, and their batters tend to have a higher proportion of ground nuts (Sacher torte is a notable exception). They can be either single-layer or multi-layer.

There. Not exactly academic, but at least I've stuck my flag in the dirt. All those who care to add to this or comment, please do.

How many Sacher Tortes does the Sacher Hotel sell each year? Through the Sacher hotel, the various Sacher shops and via their online store, some quarter million "original" Sacher tortes are sold each year.

Other than its flavor, texture, and historical and cultural pedigree, Sacher torte is notable in that it is the only pastry ever to be the subject of a nearly decade-long lawsuit. It seems that Franz, the son of Eduard the Inept Innkeeper (grandson of Franz Sacher, the inventor of Sacher torte) was himself a bit of a bungler, at least as far as intellectual property rights were concerned. For some reason, around the year 1955 — and this where the story gets murky — Vienna's most famous pastry shop, Demel's, acquired the top secret recipe. Just how Demel's got it, whether they bought it from Franz Jr., whether he gave it to them, had it stolen or lost it in a lightning round of strip poker isn't clear. What is clear is that for whatever legitimate or semi-legitimate reason, Demel's began making and selling Sacher Torte.

This cut into profits at the Sacher hotel. But more than that, it deprived them of bragging rights to the One True Torte. And so, over the course of the next many years, the high courts of Vienna were consumed with the knotty problem of what constituted a "true" Sacher Torte. In the end the courts ruled in favor of the Sacher Hotel, granting them the exclusive rights to call their torte the "Original" Sacher Torte, while Demel's had to settle for ignominious title of "Genuine". Broken and dispirited, the Demel's crew trapsed back to their bake shop and proceeded to make millions off their torte just the same.

The defeat was also a bit of a blessing in disguise as it freed Demel's up to make Sacher Torte the "right" way — or so they say — by putting their apricot jam on top of the cake layers instead of in the middle, which any idiot can see is the only proper way to do it. I mean really.

Other than the man for whom the first Sacher torte was made you mean? He was the most powerful statesman of his time, the so-called "arbiter of Europe" who oversaw the joint effort to redraw the map after the 25 years of turmoil that began with the French Revolution in 1789 and finished with the defeat of Napoleon in 1814. That joint effort was known as the Congress of Vienna (held in you-know-where) and it brought together the four main powers that were allied against Napoleon: Austria, Russia, Prussia and Great Britain.

Contrary to what you might think, the Congress wasn't really about punishing the French, even though Napoleon had pretty much managed to obliterate Europe trying to put all his crazy utopian ideas into practice. Rather the idea was to punish France just enough (and by extension reward the allies just enough) to balance the big five powers so they couldn't make war on each other. By that yardstick the Congress of Vienna was a smashing success, since nobody fought anyone else with any great intensity for 40 years.

From the point of view of social reformers, however, it was something of a setback, since from then on the governments of Europe were in no mood for anybody's big revolutionary ideas. Having harnessed the power of national conscription and industrial weapons production, Napoleon had managed to marshal armies of a size the world had never seen before. The destruction and upheaval were unprecedented. And then there were the revolutionaries, who'd tried to re-name the days of the week and the months of the year, for goodness sakes! No more. The message from on high was: enough monkey business, the grownups are back in charge. Old aristocratic families were returned to power. Social order, religion and adherence to tradition were the new ethos. It was called the Conservative Order and it prevailed in Europe until the masses rose again in 1848, but that's another story.

Metternich was the prime mover behind all of this, which meant he was no small-potatoes Austrian prince. He was the post-Napoleonic era's most powerful man. So if you're wondering how a simple chocolate sponge cake with apricot filling ever got such incredible name recognition, you might start there.

Reader Laura G. writes:

This weekend I was taken out for a VERY nice dinner in a super fancy and famous restaurant in the SF area. The pastry chef sent out macaron as an off-the-menu treat, as some chefs are wont to do. I found myself wondering, "does Chef ____ read Joe Pastry?" Further bonus points because I was able to speak intelligently (or so I thought after so much wine) about macarons and "feet".

Many of you surely laughed when I talked about the social benefits of being among the macaron "feet" cognoscenti. But who's laughing now, eh? All this trivial knowledge will serve you well one (drunken) day, mark my words!

Yesterday I wrote this about coconut fat:

Easy to extract, abundant, cheap, and above all solid at room temperature (a very rare thing for a plant fat), it was the perfect alternative to butter. Except that one day some food scientist somewhere realized that it was rather a bad thing as a regular part of the human diet. Amazingly high in saturated fat, it's artery-clogging potential exceeds that of even the most unhealthful animal fats.

It was the kind of breezy, blanket statement that's a mainstay of mainstream food journalism, something I'd have jumped all over a Times writer for. Imagine my embarrassment at having been called on it by my very own readers. Chef Tim has this to say:

There's a misconception that coconut oil is not good for your health. Contrary to the hydrogenated coconut oil which you described Joe, "virgin" coconut oil, seems to have quite a few health benefits as well as making your kitchen smell like a tropical day at the beach. It has a very low flash point, which you have to be aware of but the flavor takes my Indian, Carribean and vegetarian recipes over the top. True, coconut oil does contain high amounts of saturated fats, however, research indicates its such that it doesn't raise LDL levels. Additionally, coconut oil seems to have some heart-healthy benefits. It contains nearly 50% lauric acid, which aids in preventing a variety of heart ailments as well as reducing high cholesterol and high blood pressure. I used some last nite to gently saute some shredded cabbage with jalapeno, cilantro and lime. I enthusiastically encourage you to play around cooking with virgin coconut oil.

Reader Lexi also contributes this:

The bad rep apparently originated from research done around 50 years ago, using hydrogenated coconut oil. Once hydrogenated, the coconut oil becomes devoid of essential fatty acids. It's the essential fatty acid deficiency, as well as trans fatty acids, that causes higher cholesterol levels. Yes, coconut oil is high in saturated fat. However, it's simply not true that saturated fat (whether animal or vegetable sourced) = BAD and unsaturated fat = GOOD. Fats are a fascinating subject, and I am no expert, but it's much more complicated than that, as I've found from extensive reading. I think we should simply enjoying the many cooking and eating benefits of coconut oil, rather than rationalizing that just a little won't hurt. It's actually good for you (though I am aware many folks disagree).

What can I say? I got lazy and sloppy. As a staunch defender of fat under nearly all circumstances, I'm mortified. It shall not happen again...until next time.

Pastry Chef Philana weighs in from London with these thoughts on coconut macarons:

You can do the same for pistachio macarons (1/3 finely ground pistachios 2/3 ground almonds to combat the excess fat in the pistachios) Although Spanish or peeled pistachios are the only ones that look nice. If you use pistachios with skins - they look horrible. Ground Hazelnuts can be substituted 1:1 for ground almonds to make hazelnut macarons.

Good stuff. Thanks Philana!

Well, at least in the world of baking and pastry they do. I know what some of you are thinking: is this going to be another trip to the year 1683 and the Battle of Vienna — the most baking-intensive conflict in the history of man? This is one time when the answer is no. Sacher Torte only dates to 1832, the year a young pastry chef (very young in fact, he was a mere 16) by the name of Franz Sacher created the cake for Prince von Metternich (full name: Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar Fürst von Metternich-Winneberg- Beilstein), the second most famous diplomat of his time after Talleyrand (Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Prince de Benevente).

There are several versions of Sacher torte's creation. One posits that Sacher was Metternich's personal pastry chef when he hit upon his famous recipe, which seems unlikely since he was so very young. Another has it that Sacher was merely a hired hand in the kitchen of the Metternich estate at the time, which seems even less likely. A third maintains that Sacher was an apprentice baker at a pastry shop in Vienna frequented by Metternich, which seems the least likely of all, since it's hard to imagine a top diplomat of the Austrian Empire browsing pastry shops for fun (especially in those days when there were servants to do those sorts of things). But whatever the circumstance, all the stories share a basic plot line: that the master chef had fallen ill, Metternich was hungry, and Sacher was forced to deliver. And deliver he did, with a dessert that has since become the very emblem of Viennese pastry.

The popular notion that the Sacher torte was named for the Sacher Hotel is actually mistaken. The hotel wasn't built until 1876, by which time the torte was already world famous. Yet the family name is the same, the establishment having been built by Franz Sacher's son Eduard in 1876. Yet Eduard, it seems, wasn't exactly gifted in the art of hotel management. It took Eduard's death, and the ascension of his tough-as-nails, cigar-smoking wife Anna to turn the hotel into the world class institution that became around the turn the last century, and remains to this day.

What are these? Why, coconut macarons of course! I couldn't resist the pun. The meringues contain a 50-50 mix of ground almonds and ground coconut (if you want to try it yourself, I'd advise a mixture with more almond — about two thirds — since the extra coconut fat made for a less stable batter), and the filling is plain buttercream with about half a cup of cream of coconut beaten in.

I knew there was a happy mid-point somewhere.

I can't tell you how many requests I've received for this classic, but it seems only fitting that it should come up right around the Christmas holiday, when most home bakers are thinking about whipping up something special. Sacher torte is an excellent holiday pastry for several reasons. It's challenging without being overly so, it's satisfying without being over-the-top rich, and it can be made up to five days ahead of time and stored in the fridge without any noticeable sacrifice in quality. A winner all the way around.

I should insert here that this project, while it will be welcomed by many, is being dreaded by some, notably regular reader and contributor Gerhard. I don't think I'm giving too much away by disclosing that Gerhard is an employee of the city of Vienna. When I happened to mention this week's project to him in a friendly email last week, he had a small anxiety attack. Fortunately he's on vacation this week, traveling to a distant locale where he won't have access to the internet. I was deeply flattered that he regarded my attempt at Sacher torte to be a PR crisis of a scale that he momentarily considered staying home. Kinda makes a guy proud.

Anyway, with Gerhard safely out of the way it should be smooth sailing from here. Let's do it!

Pastry Chef Camille files this report from the Continent:

Funnily enough, I saw a pile of coconut macaroons in a bakery here in Paris yesterday. They were called "congolais." Just thought you'd like to know that even here in macaron land, macaroons do exist. :)

Turns out those Parisians really do have taste!

Toasted coconut is one of pastrydom's most beautiful sights, I think. These shaggy cookies resemble French macarons only in name, however they are a true pedestrian delight, at least if you like coconut. I think they deserve the royal treatment. Start by tossing your sweetened and unsweetened coconut together with the salt.

Next — and this is an important step — stir your can of cream of coconut. Some of the coconut oil always congeals on top.

Combine all your liquid ingredients together in a medium bowl...

...and give them a good whisk.

Add to the coconut mixture...

...and toss to combine.

Lay heaping tablespoons down on parchment-lined sheet pans (you'll have about 45).

Then with moistened fingertips, go back and form the heaps into rounded mounds.

Bake on high racks at 375 for seven minutes, rotate the pans back to front and top to bottom, and bake seven minutes more, or until the coconut is nicely browned.

If you want to gild the lily a bit, you can dip the flat bottoms of the macarons in a little melted semisweet chocolate, and cool them on parchment. Yow, that's good.

The question of fat was raised yesterday in an email. Specifically, where's the fat in the macaron cookie recipe below? Don't most cookies us butter as a base? The answer is that the fat is in there, just not in the form of dairy fat. The fat that macaroons contain — and they contain a good deal of it — is in the form of coconut oil. Dried coconut flake (or copra as it's called in the bulk grocery biz) is over 70 percent coconut oil. It doesn't seem particularly "oily" to the touch since coconut oil is solid at room temperature. Which begs the question why it isn't just called "fat." All I can say is that somewhere someone decided we'd call fats from plants "oils" and fats from animals "fats." It's not a texture thing, it's a source thing.

Not many of us remember nowadays that coconut oil was once as ubiquitous as vegetable shortening in food. It was in everything from candy to commercial baked goods, and was one of the primary fats in margarine. The reason, because once you refine coconut oil it's almost totally flavorless. That makes it handy as a general-purpose fat: for cooking, for baking, for frying, to spread on your toast...anything. Easy to extract, abundant, cheap, and above all solid at room temperature (a very rare thing for a plant fat), it was the perfect alternative to butter. Except that one day some food scientist somewhere realized that it was rather a bad thing as a regular part of the human diet. Amazingly high in saturated fat, it's artery-clogging potential exceeds that of even the most unhealthful animal fats. And so, quietly, coconut oil began to disappear from ingredient lists, to the point that today it seems like a rare and exotic substance.

A macaroon or two every so often, however, won't do you any harm at all.

Mexico Bob reminds me that in Mexico "coco" is also slang for "head" and also for "ghost" or "boogeyman".

People love to mock the Professor on Gilligan's Island for all his goofy coconut contraptions. I remember one episode where he made a transistor radio, and then there was the time Mr. Howell had those fainting spells, and the Professor built him that coconut shell MRI machine. Sure it was all a little far-fetched, but it underscored a very important point: that the coconut really is one of the world's most versatile plants.

The Sanskrit word for coconut is kalpa vriksha which roughly translates to "everything you really need in life". A coconut provides food (its meat), drink (its water), cooking and/or serving vessels (its shell), fuel to cook with (shells and husks) and building material for a shelter to do your cooking and/or eating in. People use coconut wood to construct houses, thatch to cover roofs and fiber to make mats, rope, brushes and baskets. Of course the coconut palm's utility doesn't stop there. People carve canoes out of them, make musical instruments...the list goes on.

Did you know that coconut water can be used as IV fluid? It's true. The roots can also be used to make clothing dye, tooth brushes and mouthwash. The meat and water can be made into laxatives and curatives for heart conditions, fevers and bladder problems and the oil is an antimicrobial. So you see, the Professor was really onto something with all those inventions of his. I like to think of him as a man ahead of his time.

Opinion is sharply divided on where the coconut originated, though the bulk of the evidence favors Southeast Asia and especially India. Because the coconut seems to have quite a few close relations in Central America, especially in the region of Panama, some cite the New World as its place of origin. But then there are also ancestors/relations in Africa and New Zealand, so it's really hard to know.

What is known for sure is that the coconut does extremely well in the tropics due to all the humidity, and very poorly everywhere else, which is why it grows nowhere in Asia west of India and nowhere north of the Philippines. But that leaves quite a heck of a lot of territory, and with the help of early traders and explorers, notably the Arabs and the Portuguese, the coconut has managed to exploit just about every available land mass, including Central America, the Caribbean and West and East Africa.

It was in fact the Portuguese who named the coconut, "coco" being sailor slang for "monkey face", owing to the three holes (actually germination pores) on its surface.

It was brought to my attention by no less than eleven emailers last night that apples are not drupes. Eight of those further pointed out that coconuts are not the only drupes whose seeds are more desirable than their fruit. Almonds are also drupes, I learned, as is coffee.

What can I say except that I had no idea that the biological sciences were so well represented in the Joe Pastry readership. I thank you all for writing in and keeping me on the straight and narrow. The corrections have been made for posterity.

The coconut isn't actually a nut, but the stone from a type of fruit known as a drupe. Collectively, we eat a lot of drupes. Nectarines, mangoes and olives spring to mind. Yet the coconut is one of only a very few whose seeds are more desirable than their fruit. Not that eating that seed all that easy easy to do. You usually need either a saw, a power drill or a machete to break into one.

The toughness of the coconut is what's thought to be behind it's extraordinary dispersion among islands in the South Pacific. Coconut trees are highly tolerant of salt water, and their shallow roots prefer beach sand. Combine those adaptations with tough fruit that floats like a football and high productivity (some coconut trees can produce 75 fruits a year), and you have one of nature's most effective seed dispersal machines. Fruit that drops off the tree into the surf (or gets carried out by the tide) can float for months at sea and still take root when it washes up on a distant beach. Caribbean coconuts have been found as far away as Norway, still capable of germinating.

All that toughness makes them a bit dangerous too. When you consider that a coconut tree can grow up to 80 feet or more in height and a decent-sized coconut can weigh between four and five pounds, they have some real injury-causing potential. A 4 1/2 pound coconut dropped from 80 feet is traveling in excess of 250 miles per hour by the time it hits the ground, and strikes with a force of just under 2,500 pounds per square inch. Ouch. Fortunately, human heads are pretty tough things themselves (especially among us thick-skulled pastry types). For that reason, death by coconut is rare, far rarer than the 150-per-year statistic Florida state officials once bantered about to make people feel better about shark attacks. Hey, ten times more people die from coconut impacts than shark bites every year, folks. Ah, but then coconuts don't rip your limbs off when you get too close to them, do they governor? That was always my problem with those press conferences.

Still, it's true that concussions from coconuts aren't at all rare in coconut cultivation locales like the Dominican Republic. No wonder people there associate coconuts with madness. Me, I think I'd wear a football helmet everywhere I went.

That's a bit of a toughie. The macaroon springs from the macaron, which means the origination point of the macaroon is somewhere in Italy. The French macaron was developed sometime in the 18th Century, so it's safe to assume that the idea of the macaron/macaroon had pretty well spread around all of Europe by the beginning of the 19th. However while almonds and/or almond flour might have been commonplace in the south of Europe, they were by no means everyday groceries in the North. Almond trees don't grow very well in cool, wet climates, which meant that if more than a few people in, say, the British Isles were going to enjoy the meringue-based sensation known (locally) as the macaroon, they were going to have to find another nut to base it on.

As it happened, an exotic new item was just coming up from the tropics that filled the bill perfectly. That nut wasn't really a nut (as I'll explain in more detail later), it was the giant seed of a tropical palm tree, the so-called coconut. Coconut meat made a big bang among confectioners in England starting in about the mid-1800's, the time when all sorts of strange nutmeats were being brought in by ship from all over the world. It combined perfectly with all that New World sugar that everyone was so excited about. The trouble with coconut was that it didn't ship all that well. The nuts themselves were round and mostly empty on the inside, making them costly items to transport, and when traders tried to extricate the meat and pack it in barrels, they found it spoiled quickly. Thus for several decades coconut only entered Europe in dribs and drabs.

That all changed when a Ceylon-based French company, J.H. Vavasseur & Co., invented a method for shredding and drying coconut, which made it a snap to pack and ship. The European taste for coconut exploded, and by the turn of the 20 Century, the Vavasseur company was shipping in an estimated 60,000 tons of shredded coconut annually. Exactly who first combined some of that coconut with egg whites and sugar to create the modern coconut macaroon is a mystery, however it's thought that it was a Brit, and more than that a Scot. It's been said that coconut macaroons were invented by a confectioner in Glasgow somewhere around the year 1900, though that claim is to my knowledge undocumented. Coconut was starting to catch on in America about that time (we were quite late to the coconut party), so it's possible that it was invented here.

Wherever it was invented, one thing is certain: the true bastion of the cookie-like coconut macaroon is America. Or at any rate that's my story, and I'm stickin' to it.

It turns out last week's project was perfectly timed from a marketing standpoint, as Starbucks is preparing to test-market French macarons in many of their stores. To believe the reviews, the macarons are decent if not great. They are, however, very reasonably priced. Whereas macarons in Paris can cost several dollars each, Starbucks will sell you a dozen for $10. Not half bad. Be warned, however, that they'll only be on sale from December 13th until Christmas.