To be honest I cannot recall any desserts we ate in Russia. This is not to say that they don’t have any, but I could not conjure up one of my own and so took to the Internets and came across this honey cake recipe. The nesting dolls in the upper left-hand corner only ensure that this is a tried and true Russian recipe. However tried and true is far from inaccurate as I will detail.
I fancy myself pretty good at baking – I even call myself a baker. I think I grasp basic baking and cooking concepts easily and can certainly follow a recipe as well as understand what went wrong in a given recipe when it comes out sub-par. I take a mental note of it and understand to alter it later when I again try to make it. Given this, I was pretty frustrated with this recipe. Though the method didn’t SEEM to make sense, but I went with it anyway in an effort to learn new techniques. FAIL.
The recipe instructed you to heat the butter, sugar and honey in a pan and then add it to the beaten-egg-flour-mixture. I did this. In fact, I did this twice. The first time after adding this hot mixture to the egg-dough there were sizable chunks in it. I figured I must have heated the sugar too hot and thus created scrambled eggs – an unappealing mouth feel and taste for sure and one I have overcome before while making pastry cream. I tossed it all out and started again to have something similar occur, but the chunks were much smaller. I tossed that out as well and moved on a the creaming method, which just made more sense to me and for the recipe.
butter sugar egg honey
I added the other ingredients and the batter finally came together in a smooth manner – in a batter manner if you will.
The other problem I had with this recipe was its insistence of baking eight separate layers and this may be a problem because of my relatively limited experience, or my alterations with the recipe and thus consistency of the batter, or it could be that this recipe is faulty by nature. Whatever the culprit, I found it near impossible to spread the batter neatly and evenly as thin as requested over the spring-form pan. After a failed attempt, I opted to bake the cakes in two pans where after baking i cut the cakes in half. Not eight separate layers as demanded, but halfway there – literally.
super fuzzy cake picture!
The only thing in this recipe that was full proof was the cream filling, which required nothing more than mixing three ingredients together and icing the cake so it was made to be easy and coherent.
It deviated from the photo on the recipe, but it was still very attractive, and more so since I got to use one of my new display dome and trays.
And so this is how the Russian Dinner Night concluded. We ran out of good Russian vodka but still have fantastic wine, good food and great friends, which may (or may not?…depending on how you roll) be most important anyway.
[...] Honey cake concludes the fascinating Gastronomy612 Russian Dinner Night series, white pizza with arugula, Nutella swirl pound cake, rosemary and white bean soup with cauliflower cream, butter chicken, and shaved carrot salad with sambal dressing. var addthis_pub = "heavytable"; var addthis_options = 'favorites, digg, delicious, stumbleupon, twitter, facebook, reddit, more'; var addthis_brand = "The Heavy Table"; [...]