I’m not baking this (not yet anyway) but it was such a saga, I had to share.
I got bit by the “Russian Honey Cake” bug a few years back via Instagram and the version served at the 20th Century Cafe . I don’t live in California, so I never had that particular cake, but waited patiently until I might try it locally in NYC.
Unrelated to cake, I had joined a “Buy Nothing” group on Facebook; in these groups, hyper-local neighbors offer, for free, anything they’re giving away. If you live in walking distance, you can bop over and pick it up. Chairs, sporting equipment, unwanted gallons of milk, clothing, retired infant onesies - all sorts of things are offered by people to their neighbors.
You can see where this is going.
One evening, a neighbor offered slices of fresh homemade by her Russian mother-in-law Russian honey cake. The neighbor had had a huge, swanky benefit party in her home, and several kinds of cake were left over.
You never saw me put on my shoes so fast.
I walked over and received the huge slice of cake. I ate it with my hands on the way home. It was such a Brooklyn moment! The cake was delicious, just as I had hoped, with an unusual graham-cracker flavor and a beautiful texture, unlike anything I’d had before. And it wasn’t sickeningly sweet like most American baked goods.
Since that day I hadn’t had the cake again, and I left NYC temporarily for quarantine, so I figured it would be a while before I had any access to it. I thought many times about making it myself as a pandemic project. What stopped me was my suspicion that I wouldn’t have help eating it, and while that might sound like a feature, not a bug, I really need to stop making and eating entire desserts by myself here in year 2 of a worldwide pandemic.
Last week I heard about a Ukraine-related benefit at an Eastern European church about 45 minutes from here. Having eaten almost nothing but my own cooking for 2 years, and starved for anything different, I immediately planned to go. Not thinking about honey cake specifically, but interested in whatever food might be on offer, I drove to the benefit with a plan to arrive just as it was starting. It was so heartwarming to see the parking lot already overflowing, despite bad weather! I hustled over to the bakery tent so see what the church ladies had baked up, and there it was: a honey cake.
$40 later, the cake was in my trunk.
It turns out the church ladies there are minor cake-baking celebrities, and I was lucky to arrive early to snag one of the honey cakes. There were several other varieties I would’ve loved to try, but there was no “by the slice” option, so I had to stick with my choice. (In particular, there was a “Kyiv cake” with lots of coffee and hazlenut going on, and that sounded so good to me!)
It’s so good. I froze half of it, after consulting with The Ladies, and I’m keeping my eyes peeled for the next benefit. Even with the price of gas these days, it’s well worth the drive, and the money’s going to a good place, too.
The End!
