On Monday, Election Eve, I had unwittingly double-booked myself. In addition to committing to help get out the vote in Virginia, I was meant to be contributing a dessert to a lunchtime program with a Russian1 theme. My assigned baked good was Medivnyk, Ukrainian spiced honey cake, which I suspect — and the interwebs suggest — is typically a Christmas cake. A quick search reveals that there are as many variations on this cake as there are families; I found five without much trouble, some of which include ingredients like coffee or orange juice or sour cream (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I don’t actually know the origin of the recipe I used: I was given a recipe photocopied from a cookbook, and I followed it.
If you’ve helped your mother or grandmother make an Irish-style Christmas cake before, the recipe will be less daunting. You put all the additions in a bowl with flour, in my case currants, raisins, and chopped walnuts. You heat the honey and add the spices to it, remembering that baking soda added to hot honey will make it foam like crazy and therefore you’ll need a taller saucepan than you might initially think based on volume alone. You mix the wet ingredients together into a stiff dough, using a mixer. You add in the flour-coated additions, nearly dislocating your shoulder. (I have to admit that at this point I made the incredibly impolite exclamation of ‘no wonder those Eastern European women are all built like oxen!’ for which I most sincerely and heartily apologize.) If you are stronger than I am, you move on to beating the egg whites until stiff and folding those in; if you are as strong as I am or weaker you call in reinforcements in the form of anyone else in the house at the time to dislocate their shoulder by helping you. Once the egg whites are folded in, the dough returns to a more batter-like consistency that can be spooned into the loaf pans. Loaf pans which you have buttered to within an inch of their inanimate lives and which are themselves lined with parchment paper that has been buttered to within an inch of its life on both sides. You then bake the loaves at what seems like incredibly low heat, 300F, for what seems like an incredibly long time, 90 minutes. In my case, the taller loaf pan required an additional 10 minutes or so, and the shorter one probably would have been fine at 85 minutes.
When the loaves are done, you tap them out of the pans, remove the buttery paper, and let them cool to room temperature. They are then loosely wrapped in wax paper and left to stand at room temperature for 1 or 2 days, depending on how far ahead you planned and when you need to serve them. This is the point when you will be wondering if this is the type of cake you soak in a bowl of brandy; it is not, sadly, that type of cake. It is, though, quite tasty, and perfect as an accompaniment to tea or coffee.
Having acknowledged that this is, in fact, a very nice cake, I have to say that I plan to never make it again. Unless I have a Ukrainian friend to impress, and that friend is an elderly person on their deathbed. Because it was hard and I’m a wimp, that’s why! Seriously, though, this strikes me as a recipe that one makes because it’s what one grew up with and it tastes like home and Christmas at Grandma’s. Like, you know, fruitcake. If Medivnyk isn’t in your particular personal or cultural history, it’s a lot of work for a spiced loaf.
1I know that the Ukraine is not Russia. I expect that the ladies who organized this lunch know it, too. The focus of the day was a visit by Naomi Collins to discuss her book about living in Soviet-era Moscow as an American, and I imagine that time’s linguistic conflation of ‘Russia’ and ‘the USSR’ bore out in the general description of all the dishes as ‘Russian.’
