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HONEY CAKES (a German recipe)
Put two ounces of butter into a saucepan, and when melted, stir in half a pound of honey. Let it boil, stirring briskly all the time. Take it from the fire, and, when slightly cool, mix with it the finely-minced rind of half a lemon, two ounces of sweet almonds, blanched and coarsely pounded, the eighth of a nutmeg, grated, and half a pound of flour, and, last of all, half an ounce of carbonate of soda dissolved in a small quantity of warm water. Leave the mixture in a cool place twelve or fourteen hours. Roll it out half an inch thick, cut it into small square cakes, put a thin slice of candied peel in the middle of each cake, and a slice of blanched almond in each of the four corners. Bake in a moderate oven for twenty-five minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for a dozen cakes.
This is a plain English rendering of German Honigkuchen, the honey-and-almond ancestor of Lebkuchen. It works, with two caveats: the raising agent is wildly out of proportion by modern reckoning, and the overnight rest is not optional.
- The soda is the problemHalf an ounce of carbonate of soda (about 14 g, roughly three level teaspoons) to half a pound of flour is many times what any modern baker would use. Even allowing for the acidity of honey, that quantity is likely to leave a soapy, metallic aftertaste and a darkened crumb. One rounded teaspoon for this quantity of flour is the sensible reading; older recipes of this type also called for pearlash or hartshorn, harsher-tasting leaveners that bicarbonate of soda came to displace over the nineteenth century.
- Moderate oven350F / 175C. Twenty-five minutes gives a firm, dry cake that hardens further as it cools — that is correct for this style, not overbaking.
- Boil the honey brieflyBring the butter and honey just to a rolling boil and take it off. Honey scorches easily, and prolonged boiling concentrates the syrup enough that it sets hard on cooling and makes the dough unworkable.
- Cool before the soda goes in"Slightly cool" means below hand-hot. Add soda to a hot syrup and it gasses off in the bowl instead of in the oven.
- The twelve-hour restThis is the hinge of the recipe. The dough must sit so the flour hydrates fully in the honey and the mixture firms enough to roll; freshly mixed it is a sticky paste. A cool larder is meant, not a refrigerator, which will make it too stiff to handle without warming.
- WeightsHalf a pound is 225 g; two ounces is 55 g. Sweet almonds are ordinary almonds — the distinction is from bitter almonds, which are a different thing and not used here.
- RollingHalf an inch is thick for a biscuit and gives the dense, chewy Lebkuchen texture. Roll between sheets of baking paper with a light dusting of flour; the dough is tacky and will fight a bare rolling pin.
- Candied peelBuy whole candied citron or orange peel in pieces and slice it yourself. The chopped supermarket mix is too fine and too wet to sit as the single decorative square the recipe intends.
- Yield and keepingA dozen small squares, as stated. They are better after three or four days in a tin and traditionally kept for weeks; a slice of apple in the tin softens them if they go too hard.
Honey cakes of this kind are the domestic branch of German Lebkuchen, a sweetmeat generally traced to medieval monastery bakehouses, where honey, imported spice and almonds were all to hand, and later to the guild bakers of Nuremberg, who by the seventeenth century held a formidable reputation for it. The defining feature is that honey does all the work: it sweetens and it keeps the cake moist for weeks. Cassell's includes it at a time when German confectionery was fashionable in British households, and the long overnight rest — a shadow of the weeks-long maturing the guild bakers gave their dough — survives here in abbreviated form.