Here's a genuine Polish Honey Cake, written as transcribed by my Friend's mother...it's awesome, and I think it uses wild yeasts to get its rise (rg, I think your wifes does also).
I've made it twice, but forgot this year...thanks Pablo for reminding me a few weeks too late.
....(had to leave it outside HTML quote,as the BB doesn't like it, and edit out the parenthises that she had in the original)
Here's one our house's most famed recipes , and possibly the longest to make - it takes over a month to do properly, ha! But if you ever feel like taking a risk - it's the best honey-cake I know. We've been doing it for years. I remembered it because we just started doing it today - for Christmas. If you start within the next few days - you just might make it
till Christmas. Good luck.
Old-Polish Honeycake
Dough:
1/2 litre of honey ...real honey would be best, but artificial will do
2...not too full...glasses of sugar
1/4 kilo of butter...part of the butter should be substituted with lard)
1 kilo and 1 glass of flour...cake-flour <---the 'cleanest'
3 eggs
3 flat tea-spoons of baking soda
1/2 glass of milk,
pinch of salt
spices:
2 flat teaspoons of cinnamon
2 flat teaspoons of ginger
1/2 teaspoon of pepper
1/2 teaspoon of ground cloves
1 heaped spoon of dark cocoa
delicacies:
1 glass of chopped walnuts
1/2 glass chopped orange skin fried in sugar
1/2 glass of raisins
The dough must be prepared at least a month before Christmas and baked 7-9 days before Christmas...I'd say 11 days, for the plum-jam to bite through.
Honey, sugar and fat should be put into a pot and heated up slowly. Keep stirring it until the ingredients blend. Then cool it all and add flour,eggs, salt, soda dissolved in cold milk and the spices.
Wash and dry the raisins. Mix the dough very well, at the end add the delicacies. Form a ball of it, put it into a stoneware...best, glass or enamelled container, cover with saran wrap and a double-fold piece of cloth.
Put it away for three weeks - store in a cool place...but not the fridge.
Grease the baking-pan and sprinkle it well with flour. Put the dough in - NO THICKER THAN 5 cm....it grows like h3ll. Bake for 40-45 minutes in 180-200 degrees.
baking is always a bit of a crisis and we all get grey-hair from it - the cake alternately won't grow at all and swells up filling the whole oven, but don't worry, there hasn't been a case that the honey-cake was bad,I swear.
After baking, wrap it in a cloth and put away for 7-10 days, until the cake gets soft. Then slice it in half and spread good plum jam. You can put chockolate coating on it, but I think that's no good.
As for plum-jam, we always use my mom's, which is almost not sweet at all, but tastes a bit as if smoked, it's great. But I'm sure you have your own
favourites. It generally shouldn't be too sweet, and it's there mainly tosoften and moisten the cake.
The honey-cake gets better and better in time, it's usually the best when it's all gone and eaten.
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Gabriela Kulka
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Honey has so many other things in it, I guess