Jessica tuck 19951/11/2024 ![]() I covered the cake with the prescribed crumbs but until the moment that we sliced into the cake, I was still convinced it was a flop, that there would be no filling left, just a merged megastack of cake inside with no nuance, no joy, no point, no… I shoved it into the back of the fridge, stormed out of the kitchen and didn’t return until the next day, and then I took deep breaths. And then this happened:Īnd I was all because I couldn’t believe I’d gotten so close just to trash the whole thing. The filling/frosting takes approximately one minute to make and I was pretty excited by now because this was happening, I was finally doing this. Honey would be the logical thing to sweeten it with, but after seeing a few recipes that worked in sweetened condensed milk, only one of the most delicious substances on this earth, I sweetened mine instead with it. I expected very little, but the cookie discs - yes, cookies, but a tiny bit bendy so maybe 10 percent on its way to cake already - smelled like a kiss of buttery honey caramel as they exited the oven and I felt like we might be at the brink of honey cake greatness at last.Īfter expending so much mental energy on the layers, I decided the simplest filling option - sweetened sour cream - was the most sane place to start. I accepted that there were parts that didn’t make sense to me but I would do them anyway. I closed all the books and all of the browser windows and started typing a recipe that blended the most appealing middle ground or elements of everything I’d read. I finally, weeks later, had to make all the noise stop. The more I read, the more confused I became.** I went into a tornado of research - my Russian cookbooks, recipe websites in English and Russian via Google Translate, more Russian cookbooks through Google Book Search, having my mother-in-law call her friends that bake, YouTube videos in English and Russian - the likes I haven’t done since 2012’s Lasagna Bolognese in 2012, a dish I referred to “my culinary Mount Everest,” a mountain that has never since looked so tiny. ![]() Last month, three years later, I began anew. I ceased all medovik/smetannik studies until this madness stopped. They were for cookies! This was unquestionably a cake with plush layers. I was riveted.Īnd then I fell in… something, because the recipes I found made no sense at all. like nothing we can buy in a box) that’s at once caramel and penuche and biscoff or stroopwafel layered with a sweetened cream or custard or cream cheese, yet the version I was eating, as per the ingredients on the label, contained exactly zero of these things. It tastes like an extraordinarily good honey graham cracker (i.e. Why did nobody tell me it was as stunning as a dobos torte? I have a soft spot for cakes with a gazillion skinny layers. But things got immediately, screechingly off track.įirst, I fell in love. If I did, try to recreate it using published recipes as guidance. Try an authentic one from a Russian bakery and see if I even liked it, which I doubted I would because I’m just not that into honey. I expected it to be a fairly simple process: 1. ![]() Technically speaking, this hunt began in 2013 when I received two requests for Russian honey cake - something I’d never even heard of - within a month. Guys, if you’re ever looking for a sign that a recipe is going to be a doozy to unpack, definitely aim for a dish that nobody even agrees on the name of.* ![]() It’s almost like people might know that I have a tendency to get really obsessive when I decide I want to crack the code of a recipe and they’re hoping I’ll apply it to a long-lost loved dish they want to make a regular part of their lives again? Nah, that would be ridiculous.Įnter: medovik. From time to time when someone learns that I’m married to a Russian, they’ll ask me if I can come up with a recipe for a Russian dish they’ve had, which is hilarious because I have never been to Russia, have probably only picked up 20 words (by generous estimation) in the 13 years we’ve been together and of the maybe five Russian dishes I’ve made, I’ve simply done them my mother in-law’s way. ![]()
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