A light cake for an intense festival
The coca bamba is a soft, airy pastry, sugared on top, not heavy at all. It doesn't fill you up. It doesn't sit in your stomach. For Sant Joan, when you spend hours on your feet, surrounded by horses, toasting with gin and lemonade — that matters.
If it were a dense cake, after a couple of glasses you wouldn't be able to keep going.
The tradition of going up to grandma's
In Ciutadella there's a tradition that doesn't appear in any tourist brochure: going up to grandma's house for an afternoon snack of Sant Joan ensaïmada with hot chocolate.
It's how people recover energy in the middle of the festival. After hours of standing the intensity of the caragols, the noise of the horses and the toasting in the street, there's a moment when everyone disappears for a few minutes. To grandma's house, to an aunt's, to a mother's. A hot chocolate, a freshly made ensaïmada, ten minutes of calm. And then back into the street, with renewed strength to carry on with the festival.
It's one of those things a Menorcan doesn't explain because it seems obvious, and a visitor doesn't understand until they live it.
The right baking
The secret is in the fermentation. Long, patient. The dough has to be allowed its time to develop that characteristic texture which gives it the name "bamba" — fluffy, as if inflated.
At the bakery, we start preparing it days before Sant Joan. You can't improvise it.
A tradition that continues
Every year, since the 1960s — when Guiem Pons Fraga brought it into the catalogue — the coca bamba leaves our oven for Sant Joan. Five generations later, it's still the same recipe.
We bake it for Sant Joan and also on weekends throughout the season.