The great thing about cake is it doesn’t feel like work. You forget about work. Kids, adults, they all get the same look in their eye when they’re decorating cakes… That’s the magic right there.

Duff Goldman

Oh Duff Goldman. If only you could have seen me trying to make this cake. This nightmare of a cake-baking experience. This is the story of my Week 2 catch-up challenge. My Medovik cake. That bitch.

First off, Natasha of Natasha’s Kitchen is a goddess. Her directions and videos are so clear and simple to follow. Heck, she’s where I got the recipe for my Genoise sponge I tried a few weeks ago. So this is all on me.

Everyone has those moments when a recipe just, decides to personally victimize them. To scar them. To break their blender. The Russian Medovik (honey cake) is that for me right now.

The Medovik cake is a layered cake, kind of like a mille-feuille but with no custard or pastry cream, not exactly puff pastry, and honey in the dough. Ok, so maybe it isn’t like a mille-feuille…

Its really, really similar to a Russian Napoleon cake, but again, honey in the dough, and the layers are more like a cookie than a straight-up flaky pastry. However, some recipes seem to use puff pastry like the mille-feuille, but from my experience a lot of dessert recipes vary a lot from family tradition to family tradition. As far as my general internet research showed they’re more or less in the same family of cakes though.

If you want to give this cake a try after reading about my horror story, check out the expert recipe from Natacha’s Kitchen here.

So….How’d I do? Could I, in fact, bake that?

The first thing that really should’ve tipped me off that this would be a bad baking experience was burning my wrist while making the dough. I’m definitely gonna have a nice big blister in the next few days. But, you may be asking, how’d you burn yourself making cake dough?

Cause this dough is actually similar to a pate a choux dough; you gotta cook up stuff and then add flour. And then be miserable…..I have a…history with pate a choux…

So after melting the honey, butter, and sugar you gotta quickly whisk in the eggs in a thin constant stream. If you just dump them in the hot honey and sugar mix it will scramble the eggs. Don’t do that. Then, add enough flour so its not sticky…..mine never got completely not-sticky, and I almost added in 4 cups of flour, whereas the recipe said about 3.

The real fun part was rolling out the dough. You divide the dough into 8 equal little balls, then roll out super thin. Then you cut out a 9-inch circle and bake. I, thinking that I bake quite a bit and am going to be prepared, cut out a circle in parchment paper… too bad the dough turned out to be a nightmare to work with. IT JUST KEPT STICKING, no matter how much flour I used… Lucky for y’all my hands were covered in dough so there are no disastrous torn up dough pictures.

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Even then, my layers weren’t perfect circles. I just got to a point that the dough was getting suuuuper thin, like almost too thin…so I just had to accept the weird shapes.

The dough bakes for 4-5 minutes, until golden brown and I guess slightly puffy, it reminded me a lot of pita bread coming out of the oven. Now I want hummus. Dang it.

The fun part of any cake is making the icing, and the Medovik cake has an extraordinarily yummy sour cream whipped cream icing. Its very yum.

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Mix together a ton of sour cream with powdered sugar, whip the heavy whipping cream, then fold both together. Finally, trip on a pile of that flour you used to roll out the cake dough and fling your blender into a wall… Then, put the baked up extra dough bits into the blender and blend, having a cloud of blended cake/cookie fly into your face from the cracked blender you didn’t notice until now. So much for grinding up the cake crumbs…

And then experience the final trauma of icing a cake with uneven layers and an icing that really isn’t thick enough to fill in the gaps. Its no buttercream or cream cheese icing.

Also, remind me to get a cake stand for decorating purposes.

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By the end of it I just started flinging icing back at it, haha. See? What other food blog shows you the nitty-gritty of the baking process? All the failure that goes into it?

I’m sure there’s like, a thousand blogs.

Finally, top with the crushed up cake bits and put the cake in the fridge to set overnight and sadly eat the remainder of the icing in defeat…

~24 hours later~

The moment of truth…. did it turn out ok? Was the dough under-cooked? Did it cut cleanly? Did my friend who came over for D&D enjoy eating it?

Ok, so I have no idea how I managed to make what I think was a perfect-adjacent Medovik cake. But I really think I did? Some of the layers did just of get smushed, but I think I did that as I angrily smothered on the frosting.

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My friend and I devoured this cake. Like, I’ve made a lot of cakes in my day and this is definitely in the top 10 of best cakes I’ve ever made. Not that you fine folks reading this blog are familiar with my past baking exploits, so…just trust me on this. The cake layers were so soft and delicate. The sour cream icing is tangy and slightly sweet, and got a very nice creamy texture after sitting in the fridge overnight.

Just. Yum. Much yum.

I actually think…I might make this again. For a special occasion of course.

So, in the end, I’d have to say, yeah, I can bake that! Painfully and messily, but I can!

Later in the week I’ll be posting about Week 4’s topic, drop cookies. Stay tuned for potentially burnt cookies!

Bye!