KC 247 – Honey Cake (Medovik)

Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where one man struggles against a sea of seasoning to take up almonds of outrageous fortune, or whatever, I’ve only read Hamlet like, twice. Today’s topic is a classic Russian dessert, straight from the Tzars, and brought to us by the stars, and likely to leave Jon with a couple mental scars. What does that mean? If you already know, or don’t care, jump straight to the recipe with this link. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

Video Killed the Ravioli Star

 I’m more offended than you can imagine that “ravioli” was the best stand-in for “radio” that I could manage. Anywho, today’s recipe comes from a potentially silly source that we haven’t checked in on in almost a year, but first, I suppose we should talk about its history. Today’s dish is medovik, though I have also seen it called smetannik, and it comes to us from IMPERIAL RUSSIA.

START THE VIOLINS, WE’RE GETTING CRUNK.

Now, if you speak Russian, or at least know the names of certain big foods, you may be a little concerned by those spellings. For those who don’t, let me clarify: ‘Med’ is the Russian word for Honey, part of the same root as mead, honey-wine, and the reason that the word for bear in Russian is “medved” or “the honey-eater/that which eats honey”. (Interestingly, Russia DOES have the word ‘bear’, but there was an old belief in some eastern European/west Asian groups that naming things makes them happen/summons them. (kind of like in English, the idea of “jinxing” or tempting fate. You know, the classic idea of saying “at least it’s not raining” means it WILL rain soon.)

Now, as a small warning before I jump into this, I do not speak Russian. What I DO speak, to a degree, is Linguist, so I’m referring to others’ summations of what’s happening here and processing it. Basically, the –nik or –ik ending in Russian is a kind of combination between the –ito and –ador endings in Spanish, or the –ette and –er endings in English. Like, a Baker in English is “one who bakes”. A donette is “a small donut”. In Russian put means “road/way/path”, and putnik means “one who uses the path/traveller”.This is where Sputnik comes from, because for some reason S on the front makes it “one who uses the path (with you)”, par, meaning “steam”, becomes parnik, “steaming pot”. So medovik is “little honey” or “thing that uses honey”. Smetannik on the other hand comes from smetana, the Russian word for “a dairy product created by treating heavy cream with acid to produce a textural change”.  Or, more directly:

Daisies?

As a small aside, this isn’t TECHNICALLY correct, as the majority of smetana are richer than US sour creams: most Sour cream in the US is about 12-16% butterfat. Smetana can be sold as low as 9%, but traditionally was closer to 25-30%. But yes, sour cream, crème Fraiche, or like, whipped cream are the easiest comparisons to make. (indeed, it’s often recommended for American chefs to just straight up mix whipping cream with Sour cream if they want to replicate higher-fat Smetana (since heavy cream is about 40% butter fat, so combining equal parts sour cream and heavy cream would produce a mixture with roughly 26% butterfat.)

Anywho, Smetana is a CRUCIAL ingredient in the cooking of Russia, Poland, Hungary. It’s a salad dressing, pancake topper, dipping sauce for pierogi and pelmeni, garnish on soups, cooking ingredient, etc etc. So while it might seem weird to American readers to make a dessert out of Sour Cream, I assure you, A: it’s not all that different from, say, a Cream Cheese frosting. And B: it IS a thing. How did it come to pass? Well, that’s where things get historical.

The Asian Solution

Supposedly, this dish is one of those classic dishes of “the guy making it fucked up, but didn’t realize until far too late to do anything”. Interestingly, unlike most of those dishes, the fuck-up was, in fact, intentional, just ignorant.

I will give potstickers this: looking at more classical versions does at least make the “I accidentally cooked them too long” story more believable.

See most of these are from a legitimate mistake: “I dropped X into Y” or “I let Z cook too long”. The guy who made this dish KNEW what he was doing, he just didn’t know it was a bad idea to be doing it. Supposedly, sometime between 1801 and 1825, a new chef in the Imperial Kitchen under Alexander the First, decided to try to impress the Empress with a cool new dessert, made by making thin layers of honey-cakes, sandwiched between layers of sour cream. The honey cakes, normally fairly dry/firm, absorb the liquid from the cream and soften. Small problem with this plan: Empress Elizabeth HATED honey, and would throw a tantrum if served dishes with it. Hence the fuck-up: he was making a special dish PREDICATED on an ingredient that the recipient would hate.

Luckily for him, his process ended up removing the flavor of honey that the Empress hated, and she quite liked the dessert. It became a dish that people would have from time to time, but really took off during the soviet era for two reasons: one, the reliance on honey as a sweetener at the time made it cheaper than sugar-heavy desserts, and two: because recipes of the era said “what if we took out that perishable sour cream, and instead made the cake with a can of condensed milk, which is MUCH easier to mass produce and store for happy occasions?” (I’m sure there was also some element of propaganda/cultural symbolism to it, since the cake consists of many thin layers working together, joined into one.)

We will not just EAT Cake, but we will BE Cake! - a poorly thought out slogan.

So, that’s the backstory, and it brings up/highlights a very interesting conversation in terms of “authenticity”. To the millions of Russians who are used to the condensed milk version, I’m sure my version will be different, maybe to the point of seeming “inauthentic”. But…sweetened condensed milk didn’t exist when the recipe was invented, and while I don’t have the specific texts in front of me, the summaries I have seen do not mention a caramel or milk agent. So is my recipe MORE authentic, because it hearkens back to the first iteration, than the one that is more commonly enjoyed? Follow-up question: does it matter that I was given this recipe by, technically, a video game?

That’s right, today’s recipe comes from the Overwatch cookbook. Which might seem like a weird source, but I want to explain my thought process, and to do that, we have to talk about the process of the site. See, I’ve written before that I view a lot of this process as a way to demystify cooking, and to make recipes accessible. And one of the things you need for that is a point of reference. If you present a food without context, with nothing to grab onto, especially if it doesn’t match the culinary traditions of the people reading, it’s not accessible. Like…look, in China, they have something called “Boy eggs” which are basically slightly pickled hard boiled eggs, where the ‘brine’ is the piss of young boys. You might be disgusted by that, and I completely understand, but if I point out that piss was likely much cleaner than the local streams or rivers 3,000 years ago, so they probably started the idea because it legitimately made the food SAFER…it’s still kind of gross, but you get the idea. (Also, as a note, it’s not COMMON in China: there is literally ONE city that does it, so it’s probably tied to some historical event where they ran out of clean water or something) So, in order to make recipes accessible, I try to find points of reference.

They even look weird, right? Kind of pinkish, and the yolk doesn’t look quite right, right?
Wrong, because this is a picture of deviled eggs. But you were ready to judge it.

Sometimes, like with the Beef Stroganoff, I don’t need to work very hard: Beef Stroganoff is very well known in America. For something like Pelmeni, which are less common, I can use myself as the point of contact, and also relate it to things like Pierogi, Soup Dumplings, etc. On TOP of making it accessible, I have to pitch it to both myself (typically pretty easy unless it’s like, 10+ steps, or a 5 day process) and my family. So I was looking for something that we could conceivably on or around Thanksgiving, since I started the process about a week and a half ago. That cuts out the various summer dishes or cold soups. It knocks out interesting but complicated fish recipes…I COULD do Piroshki, but honestly, that feels more like a January/February move, since that’s when I made Pierogi and Pelmeni. I could make Cabbage soup, but I already made one Russian soup with cabbage. Frustrated, I checked the recipes in my Overwatch recipe book: Pelmeni (already done), Borscht (probably wouldn’t fly with Thanksgiving, and also Beets are high in Oxalates), a White Russian with a dash of Grenadine (maybe a little TOO easy…) and…Honey cake. Hey. A honey-based dessert for Thanksgiving sounds like a win. Slightly sour icing works, given the richness fo the meal. AND, bonus, you make it the day before, and let it chill overnight, so it’s no work the day off. That’s a win-win-win, and it is in-in-in.

So let’s talk about how every part of making it sucked, but I still think you could have fun doing it.

Easy As Eating Cake

Now, as a said before, this cake basically consists of two components: the cake itself, and the frosting. And the cake portion of it is pretty weird, so I can only guess that I was doing it right, because I was following the directions. However, while it’s kind of weird in execution, it’s pretty normal in terms of ingredients: eggs, flour, sugar, baking soda, and honey.

“The Gang Starts an International Incident”

It’s just about how the components are combined that makes it kind of weird. So the first step is to melt butter, and stir in sugar, in a medium saucepan. I think wider is better here, as you’re going to use the same pan to basically caramelize the mixture, so more surface area will let it get done faster, so don’t be tempted to use a smaller saucepan, as I was.

While the butter melts, you want to mix together the honey, baking soda, and egg. Baking soda is going to be a key player here. Baking soda makes the mixture more alkaline, which makes it brown more easily, meaning it will caramelize faster, and, in this kind of situation, it will also provide leavening, meaning the cakes won’t be completely solid. I THINK it also helps to denature the egg proteins, making them less likely to set as you add the mixture to the hot butter-sugar, but I’m not as certain on that one. Anyway, that’s what you’re doing: adding the honey-eggs to the butter-sugar, and then stirring over medium low heat for 10 minutes, scraping up the bottom as you go.

Looks kind of like the start to a custard.

Now, again, I went for a smaller saucepan, and I think that kind of hurt the process, but I don’t know. What I do know is that the whole process felt very weird to me. It’s one of those “it will slowly darken, and if you’re directly watching it as you stand there, the process doesn’t feel like it’s happening, but if you step away and come back, it looks like you’re overcooking pockets of it” sort of things, if you’re familiar with the process. The recipe also would be AMAZINGLY easier with A: better mise en place, or B: a second set of hands. I didn’t have the latter, as I’ve recently poorly handled my anxieties and stress by staying up until 4 in the morning, so I started this recipe at like, midnight? Maybe 11 PM. I mention it now because the thing I kept stepping away to handle was measuring out the three cups of flour I was going to need. Anyway, after 10 minutes, though mine was more like 14ish, your mixture will look more like this.

The culinary equivalent of an awesome tan.

Once your honey-egg-butter-sugar mixture has darkened, you want to take it off the heat, and stir in the flour. And here’s where I’m going to give you a BIG piece of advice: the directions are “stir in flour, moving the dough to a cutting board when it becomes too hard to stir in the saucepan” And I moved to the cutting board far too early. I was AGONY trying to knead the dough at first, because A: it was still kind of hot and B: it was way too sticky. I would definitely say try to incorporate at least a cup and a half of the flour before moving to the cutting board.

You have no idea how long I spent prying stuck-on-dough from my hands.

At this point, the laborious part of the recipe starts. Oh yeah, all of this was the easy part. Now, you’ve got to knead the remaining flour into the dough, break the dough into 8 equal parts, and then start the production line: You gotta turn each ball into a roughly 8-inch circle, with additional scraps, and bake two circles at a time, for about 5 minutes. This is where two people would REALLY help, so you’d be able to like, roll out two circles, pop them in the oven, and you could take a quick break while they roll out the next set, trading off.

You can chill, and then your cakes can!

Once you have 8 thin cakes, which will be almost cracker-like in texture once they cool, you take the scraps, and roll out two additional circles…or, you know, kind of give up, since these two are just going to be ground up into a crumb for the outside, so it doesn’t matter if they’re actually circles.

A clear difference between “Jon trying” and “Jon giving up”.
Also, the color will be explained in a second.

Now you’ve gotta start the icing/frosting, which starts by beating whipped cream and powdered sugar, which I TRIED to do by hand, before learning that my feeble wrists and undeveloped…traps? Is that an arm muscle? (it is a SHOULDER muscle. I have several friends who are doctors/nurses.) Anywho, I whisked for like, 2 solid minutes, and my arms were already starting to hurt, so I said “screw it”, and busted out a hand-mixer. Then, I immediately broke a measuring spoon trying to scoop out the sour cream. (I was trying to avoid dirtying another spoon, and instead destroyed one. Nice.) Also, at this point, you will remember that you put in things that were only supposed to cook for 5 minutes about 7 minutes ago, and will have to quickly pull out your ONLY BARELY BURNED crumb-cakes. This was a very emotional 8 minutes.

RIP to S-POO-NEE.

Cakes no longer in danger, fold the sour cream into the whipped cream, and the resulting icing is honestly pretty hard to identify as sour cream based. Like, it’s a LITTLE ‘sour’, but it mostly just tastes like thick whipped cream. At which point things get kind of easy again, though I did frustrate myself trying to find a low-sided plate to build the cake on. But it’s really just “set down a cake, spread some icing on top, repeat until cakes are gone, and then spread icing on top and outside”

Carried out with professional skill and precision.

Let it sit, covered, in the fridge overnight, so the moisture can soften the cakes, and then crumble up your extra cakes, sprinkle on the outside, and SERVE in slices. You DID IT. 8 layers, 10+ hours, but you’ve made honey cake!

So, the cake is upside down in this picture, but you can see the EXACT moment I realized I was putting too much filling between the layers.

And it is perfectly fine! It’s not like, mind-blowing, but its soft, sweet, kind of graham cracker-y with the toasted honey flavor. Nate noted that he quite liked it, because while it’s sweet, it’s not too sweet. He’s probably eaten more of it than I have this point, which is a stirring commendation. Overall, I think doing this as like, a two person project would be actually a nice little time, and the results are good enough and the ingredients cheap enough that I think it’s something you should try at home. I don’t know that I’d recommend it as a one person job, but maybe with the tips I’ve given, it won’t be nearly the problem for you it was for me.

THURSDAY: WE TALK ABOUT THE COOKBOOK MORE THOROUGHLY.

MONDAY: I’M CHURNING OUT A COUPLE RECIPES, I’LL FIGURE OUT THE ORDER BY THURSDAY.

You can make this recipe

Russian Honey Cake

Serves 6-8

Ingredients

                Cake

4 tbsp unsalted butter

¾ granulated sugar

4 tbsp honey

3 eggs, beaten

1 tsp baking soda

3 cups all-purpose flour

                Icing

1 cup heavy cream

1 cup powdered sugar

16 ounces sour cream

Preparation

1. Preheat your oven to 350 F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Then, place a medium saucepan over medium-low heat, stir in the sugar to combine. In another bowl, whisk together baking soda, eggs, and honey. Pour into the saucepan with the melted butter and sugar, stirring as you do so to prevent the eggs from setting.

2. Stir the mixture for over medium-low, making sure to scrape up the bottom to prevent it from scorching, for about 10 minutes, until darkened to a “deep golden color”. Remove from the heat, and stir in the flour, moving to a clean cutting board or counter once it becomes too hard to stir with the spoon (I recommend waiting until at least 1 ½ cups), and work in the remaining flour. Once the flour is incorporated, knead a few more times, then divide into 8 equal pieces.

3. Roll out a piece until you can cut out an 8 inch circle, saving the scraps. Repeat with a second piece, and bake the two circles on the parchment-lined baking sheet in the preheated oven for 4-5 minutes until darkened. While it bakes, roll and cut out another 2 circles. Remove the baked circles to a cooling rack, and repeat until all 8 pieces have been rolled, cut out, and baked. Take the accumulated scraps, which in my recipe made 2 additional circles’ worth of dough, and roll out to bake and later crumble.

4. Mix the icing by beating whipped cream until stiff peaks form, stirring in powdered sugar, and then folding in sour cream.

5. Assemble the cake by layering cake, then an evenly spread layer of icing, and then repeat with the next 7 pieces of cake and more icing. Once topped, coat the sides with additional icing, cover, and put in the fridge to soften for at least 8 hours, preferably overnight.

6. The next day, crumble the additional scrap-cake-layers by pulsing in a food processor, and coat the top and sides of the cake. Slice and serve.