Labor of Love
By Naperville Magazine
Appears in the February 2025 issue.
By Peter Gianopulos
This Indonesian specialty cake layers on the goodness
Do you and your special shnookums a favor: Ditch the bonbons and do as the Indonesians do by sharing a slice of kue lapis legit.
Kue lapis legit—a labor-intensive cake that dates back to the Dutch colonization of Indonesia—is typically reserved for special family celebrations and Lunar New Year. Luckily for us, Ollyvia Putri, who runs her online Lapis312 bake shop out of a Naperville ghost kitchen, learned how to prepare them under the tutelage of a true master: her grandmother.
Putri’s love for Grandma’s sweet treats inspired her to pursue a globetrotting career in pastry making. After studying at the French Pastry School in Chicago, she worked at the Peninsula Hotel Chicago and the Pierre Hermé Paris in France, before opening up a bakery with her sister Marcella in Singapore called Ollella (a portmanteau of their two names).
Putri’s kue lapis legit cakes are stacked with 20 alternating layers of tan and chestnut-colored goodness. They’re not overly sweet. They taste more like a Dutch flapjack cake, in part because Putri uses Dutch-style Wijsman preserved butter, which imbues a whisper of mascarpone notes to the batter and guarantees an amazing shelf life: three weeks at room temperature or a full seven weeks in the fridge.
It takes Putri six hours to prepare each cake, as she shmears and then bakes each layer, one atop the next. “I could never make some of these cakes the way my grandmother did,” Putri says. “But my French pastry training allows me to make them in my own way. I’m happy to say that Grandma approves.”
She sells four different variations—butter, prune, spiced, and Nutella—which are so difficult to find in the United States that she ships her cakes all over the country. She also offers an enticing slate of other Indonesian treats: Consider pairing your kue lapis legit with a handful of nastar (mini pineapple tarts), almond cookies, or her unique sable flour and cheese biscuits, called sagu keju.
We do, too.
Photos: Ollyvia Putri
