Medovik (Honey Layer Cake)

Variations

• Whose it is. ko.wikipedia files it as a cake of "Russia and the post-Soviet countries" and notes the name comes from the Russian myod (мёд, honey). Czech medovník, Lithuanian medutis, Polish miodownik and Ukrainian medivnyk are all cousins, and each has a name of its own, so this site followed the one the name points at — the basis injera and suya already rest on.
• The Empress Elizabeth story. Alexander I's empress is said to have hated honey, until a new young baker who did not know that served her a honey cake and she loved it without noticing. The same article points out that medovik appears in no nineteenth-century Russian cookbook: its first record is Ukrainian Cuisine, published in Kyiv in 1957. It is a Soviet-era cake.
• Other creams: condensed milk whipped with butter, custard, and buttercream are all common. All hold less water than soured cream, so the layers take a day longer to soften.
• Ukrainian medivnyk: the same honey dough baked as a single loaf with no cream at all — the version without the layers.
• In Bulgaria it goes by a completely different name, Френска селска торта, "French village cake."
• How many layers: eight is the sensible number at home; a bakery goes to twelve or sixteen. Only the count changes, not the method.

Tips

• The leavening is finished outside the oven. Irish soda bread uses the same acid and base and is the exact opposite: that page is about the reaction starting the instant they meet, which is why the loaf is in the oven inside two minutes. Here the reaction is run to completion in a pan before any flour is present. That is what buys the 30-minute rest, the slow rolling and the eight separate bakes. Same chemistry, opposite timetable.
• The honey is the acid. Bicarbonate of soda does nothing on its own — it needs an acid to give off carbon dioxide. Honey sits at about pH 3.9, and that is the acid here. Swap in golden syrup or a sugar syrup and it will not foam, and the dough comes out heavy and hard.
• The lift is not there to raise the layers. There is nothing to raise in dough rolled to 2mm. The foam is there to make the dough itself light and workable, and to make the baked layer break short and crumbly. Dough that needs lift is pound cake or genoise.
• The flour is a feel, not a measurement. How wet the pan mixture is depends on your honey and your eggs. Stop while it is soft and slightly tacky and it will roll to 2mm.
• Do not throw the offcuts away. They are the coating. That there is nothing extra to buy for the outside of it is one of the nice things about this cake.
• The overnight rest is a cooking step. The layers come out of the oven hard, and water moving out of the cream is what softens them. Stroopwafel does the same thing on purpose with syrup between two crisp wafers, and koldskål's kammerjunker go on at the table to avoid it.
• Stop the soured cream at firm peaks. It is already acidic, so whipping past that splits it (dairy and heat).
• Against dobos torte: there the sponge layers are baked separately and glued with buttercream under a cast caramel sheet. These layers are biscuits rather than sponge, and the cream is not glue — it is the supply of water that makes them soft.