Polish honey gingerbread cake with plum butter and chocolate, better after two days
A Christmas gingerbread without weeks of dough resting: honey melted with butter and sugar, eggs, flour with cocoa and gingerbread spice, half an hour in the oven. Split, filled with plum butter and glazed with chocolate. Fresh from the oven it is a little dry and that is normal: after two days under cover it softens and smells like the bakery.
Your own work in that: 45 min.
- Honey and butter 20 min
- Batter 10 min
- Baking 35 min
- Cooling 60 min
- Plum butter and glaze 15 min
- Ripening 2880 min
Step by step
0 / 7 doneMelt the honey with butter and sugar
Warm the honey with the butter and sugar in a saucepan over low heat, stirring, until the sugar dissolves and the mixture is uniform. Don't boil. Take off the heat and cool 15 minutes, to lukewarm; in a hot mixture the eggs would scramble. Heat the oven to 170 °C, line the tin with paper.
Ingredients: 250 g honey · 120 g butter · 120 g sugar · 3 pcs eggs · 350 g plain flour · 2 tbsp cocoa powder · 2 tbsp gingerbread spice mix · 1½ tsp bicarbonate of soda · 100 ml milk · 1 pinch salt
TipDark honey (buckwheat, honeydew) gives a deep, slightly bitter gingerbread. Pale acacia honey is mild and the cake comes out more 'cakey'.
Melt, don't boil, coolAdd the eggs
Add the eggs to the lukewarm honey mixture one at a time, whisking each in until combined. The mixture should be smooth, glossy and even, with no streaks of white.
Eggs into the lukewarm honeyAdd the spiced flour
Sift the flour with the cocoa, gingerbread spice, soda and salt. Add to the honey mixture, pour in the milk and mix with a spoon or the mixer on its lowest speed, only until combined. The batter is thick, dark and glossy.
TipThe soda reacts with the acids in the honey and cocoa, lightening the batter and deepening its colour. Without it the cake would be paler and dense.
Flour, cocoa, spice, soda, milkBake
Spread the batter evenly in the tin. Bake 30–35 minutes at 170 °C, until a skewer comes out dry. Cool completely in the tin; warm gingerbread crumbles when cut.
Thirty-five minutes, a dry skewerSplit and fill with plum butter
Lift the cold cake out of the tin and cut it with a long knife into two even layers. Spread the bottom thickly with plum butter, cover with the top and press down lightly.
Ingredients: 300 g plum butter (powidła) · 100 g dark chocolate · 40 g butter
TipPlum butter that is too stiff: warm it with a spoon of water and it will spread instead of tearing the cake.
Two layers, a thick layer of plum butterGlaze with chocolate
Break the chocolate and melt it with the butter in a bowl over a pan of steaming water (the bowl not touching the water). Pour over the cake and spread with a spatula over the whole surface. Leave to set.
Chocolate with butter, a thin glossy layerWait two days
Cover the cake with film or put it in a tin and leave in a cool place for 2 days. Moisture from the plum butter migrates into the cake and the spices open up. Cut into squares with a knife dipped in hot water. Keeps 2 weeks in a tin.
After two days: soft, moist, fragrant
Before you start
With nuts and candied peel
100 g chopped walnuts and 50 g candied orange peel in the batter: old-Polish gingerbread in the express version.
Your own gingerbread spice
3 teaspoons ground cinnamon, a teaspoon each of ginger and cloves, half a teaspoon each of nutmeg and allspice, a pinch of pepper and cardamom. Mix together; it makes exactly 2 tablespoons, the amount for this cake.
Still hard after two days
Baked too long, or too little plum butter. Next time take it out as soon as the skewer is dry, not later. For the cake you have, put it in an airtight box with a quarter of an apple for a day: the moisture from the apple will soften it.
