Sylvanas + Sans Rival Recipe (2024)

It has been about five years since I graduated from college for baking and pastry arts. During the time I was in school, I learned an enormous amount about classic french desserts, components, and techniques. After I had finished pastry school, family friends and family members would ask me if I knew how to make sans rival. More recently I’ve had people asking me on instagram if I knew how to make it/how to do it. At first I said no, because I didn’t know what a sans rival was. It’s a filipino dessert, but the name is french for “without rival”.

I did some research. It turns out that sans rival is composed of a meringue-based nut cookie, filled with french buttercream, and coated with nuts or cookie crumbs. The meringue-based cookie is something I’ve made 1000s of times, either with almonds, or hazelnuts, and it is called a dacquoise. In this case, it’s a cashew dacquoise. After more research into the buttercream, I realized the French buttercream is almost exactly like the Italian meringue buttercream (which is my choice of buttercream for all my custom cakes), except with the simple swap of egg yolks instead of egg whites. This is perfect, because after making a meringue-based cookie, the last thing you want to do is create a meringue-based buttercream, and have an abundance of egg yolks (been there, done that…way too many times. Ice cream anyone?). The other funny thing about french buttercream is that I’ve also made the base 1000 times, it’s a base of egg yolks with a hot sugar syrup, whipped to pale, fluffy, velvety goodness, and called a pâte à bombe, and it is the perfect base for mousse.

Silvanas/sylvanas are a snack form of the sans rival cake, instead of the full layered cake, it is two cookies sandwiched with a thick layer of buttercream, coated in more buttercream, and dipped in cookies or ground nuts. To make the ube versions, an ube halaya recipe can be found here — I used half of the original recipe to make 12 silvanas and a san rival in replacement of buttercream. Check out the video tutorial for visuals!