(Sort of) Traditional Ukrainian Honey Cake A.K.A Medavik

Tomorrow is a classmates birthday! The only male in my class full of strong minded women and he takes it like a champ. He is from the Ukraine and has only lived in Canada for just over a year now. We decided to show our appreciation that we needed to bake him a cake to surprise him. I love to put a smile on people's face. I love sharing my baking. I love to do what I can to help people.

I thought I would try to bring a little bit of Ukraine to him. Having never even visited the Ukraine, Pinterest and Google were my only options to learn from. It brought up something called medavik and oh my goodness - it looked delicious. I definitely could NOT find a gluten free version of this recipe and there are many of us in our class who eat a gluten free diet. So HERE we are! I took multiple different versions of this and try to come up with a gluten free version of it. I would say it worked out great.

Now, my version wasn't entirely traditional but he told me it was VERY close! So I'll take that as a win. If you want to make it more traditional, he told me you would put prune mixture in between the layers instead of the sour cream/cream cheese mixture that I put though he said for taste it was awesome. I love to embrace different cultures and learn about the different way they eat. I love trying new foods so I very well may try this with the prune mixture one of these days. Mmmmm!

So I will share lots of photos for this one - just so you understand. It is easy ingredients BUT it took me all afternoon to create this cake. It wasn't perfect - my husband teased me and called it the leaning tower of Pisa - LOL. Looks aren't everything folks! ;)

(Sort of) Traditional Ukrainian Honey Cake A.K.A Medavik Recipe:

Ingredients:

3 Large Pasture Raised Eggs

3/4 Cup Local, raw unpasteurized Honey

2 Cups Bob Red Mills 1:1 Baking Flour

2 tsp Baking Soda

1 Tbsp Vinegar

Frosting Recipe:

8 ounces Cream Cheese

8 ounces Sour Cream

8 ounces Whipped cream (whip up your whipping cream folks and don't make the mistake I made and put it in as a liquid hahaha)

Icing Sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Whisk together the eggs and honey until foamy and light brown (takes about 2-3 minutes)

In a separate bowl, put the baking soda and vinegar together and let dissolve. Add to the egg mixture. Add flour to the mixture. Combine everything together! Now, this would be easier on a large cookie sheet... but my cookie sheet disappeared.. No where to be found, so I did it the difficult way and used 2 round pans.

Cut out parchment paper to size. Spread batter thinly and put it into the pan.

Bake for 8 minutes until it turns a beautiful brown colour.

Repeat this until you have no batter left. Now, after my second round of doing this, my batter became very difficult to work with. You can mix a few drops of filtered water in there if it becomes difficult to work with. It didn't make the batter any different! Don't thin out too much though. It should still be similar consistency to the first time you spread the batter around.

Once done this, stack them and cut the edges off slightly just so everything matches! Don't throw them out!!! You will need those to make crumbs. This was when I realized this cake reminds me of graham crackers. So good!

Take those cut off pieces, throw them back into the pan you were baking with for another 8-10 minutes until they are crispy. After they are crispy, throw them into your blender, food processor or use a rolling pin. Make them into crumbs!

Next, Cream together with a hand mixer or in my case food processor, your cream cheese and sour cream for your frosting. Once it is nice and smooth, add your WHIPPED CREAM (again, whip the whipping cream to make it fluffy before adding it LOL). The cake is very sweet so you don't want to add a whole lot of icing sugar to this. You don't want it super sweet... or maybe you do? I didn't measure the icing sugar, I just threw in a bit at a time... I would say I used approximately 1 to 1 1/2 cups maybe? You can taste it as you go.

Put a generous amount of frosting in between each layer and then put it on top and the sides. As you can see, mine was a little thin but that's ok. No shame in that! It worked fine and tasted amazing either way.

Next, take those delicious crumbs and put them on the cake! This.... will take some practice. I sort of held the cake a bit sideways and just threw them on.

That's it!!! As I said, for an even more traditional feel to it, make up a prune puree mixture and layer that inside. This was incredibly delicious. Super happy with how it turned out. I threw berries on top but I'm sure a drizzle of honey would be good or even eating it just like this would be fine too.

Enjoy

-K