A Spicy New Honey Cake for a Sweeter New Year

Last fall, I didn't make honey cake for the Jewish holidays. It was a sad season that marked the beginning of a very hard year. First, the death of my mother Alice in February. Five months later, the death of my father-in-law Murray, who is remembered on this blog for his kreplach and gedempte chicken recipes. And in the last month, we have faced a few more family health challenges.

And so I return to this blog, after an absence of many months. And once again it is time to make honey cake for Rosh Hashanah--and to hope for a sweeter new year for all of us.

The last time I made honey cake, two years ago, an unusual recipe for honey cake had started making the rounds of Jewish publications. The year before, I had finally arrived at a recipe for what I called the Best-ever Jewish Honey Cake. It was an adaptation of a recipe from the great food writer Claudia Roden. Except for a slight cosmetic problem (sinkholes in the middle) I couldn't have asked for anything better. But now this new recipe, and the story behind it, had caught my eye.

The recipe was the creation of Lior Lev Sercarz, owner of a high-end spice store in New York City and author of two cookbooks. This Israeli-born chef and spice expert wanted to capture the flavors of his childhood, so he made a few changes to the traditional holiday sweet that is strongly rooted in the Eastern European (Ashkenazi) Jewish tradition.

California honey, Israeli date syrup (silan), Slovenian honey (med) 

The most striking change? Instead of honey, Sercarz used a Middle Eastern ingredient that was new to me: silan, otherwise known as date honey or date syrup. He used olive oil to evoke memories of his father's olive groves near the Sea of Galilee. For the liquid, he added pomegranate juice instead of coffee or tea. Finally, he departed from the familiar mild "sweet spice" blend that is used in European baking, consisting mostly of cinnamon, along with touches of other spices. Instead, he used his own unique spice blends, with exotic names (like Rheims #39 and Yemen #10) and precise formulas that were only hinted at on his website. For those who had to rely on their own more modest spice collections, he suggested a simple alternative: a tablespoon of whole anise seed with smaller amounts of ginger and nutmeg.

I tried his recipe twice. Once with good Slovenian honey and once with a jar of date syrup I found in a local Middle Eastern grocery. The honey loaf was quite good, with a sharp anise flavor and a nice light texture, although my husband preferred the slightly richer and moister version from the previous year. The version with date syrup was less successful, perhaps because I used coffee instead of pomegranate juice and had to use a little rye flour when I ran out of white. The sprinkle of sesame seeds on top was a nice touch. And these loaves didn't sink at all, as you can see from the photo below.

After all that experimenting, I concluded that we still preferred Claudia Roden's honey cake recipe as a foundation, sinkholes and all. But I really liked the sharper and more complex flavor Lior Lev Sercarz created with pomegranate juice and anise. The best solution seemed to be a compromise. I put the two together and finally came up with the recipe below, which seems to be the best of both worlds, Eastern European with a touch of the Middle East.

L'Shana Tova!

Spicy Jewish Honey Cake  ( Claudia Roden meets Lior Lev Sercarz)

2 large eggs
1 cup light brown sugar
1/2 cup oil (part or all olive oil)
1 cup honey (or silan/date syrup)
2 T. rum
1/2 cup pomegranate juice
2 cups white flour
1-1/2 t. nutmeg 
1-1/2 t. ginger
1 T. whole anise seed
1-2 t. baking powder (use less to avoid sinkholes!) 
1/2 t. baking soda
pinch of salt
optional: mix in 1/2 cup broken walnuts 1/3 cup cranberries/apricots or other fruit
optional: sprinkle with sesame seeds after baking


First, prepare pans. Line a 9-inch spring form pan with foil, then oil and dust with flour. Or use three small loaf pans, 3 x 7 inches, oiled and lined with parchment paper. Set aside. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a medium-sized bowl, mix together the flour, spices, baking powder, and baking soda. Set aside.

In a small bowl, toss walnuts and dried fruit in a little flour to coat. Set aside. 

In a large bowl, beat eggs with sugar until thick and lemon-colored. Add oil, honey, rum, and pomegrante juice. Beat until smooth. Add dry ingredients slowly to liquid ingredients, beating until smooth. Finally, fold in the optional nuts and dried fruits.

Pour batter into prepared pan(s). Bake at 350 degrees until top is firm and springs back when touched, about 45 minutes for small loaf pans for 1 hour and 15 minutes for a large spring form pan. Let cool on a rack. When cool, wrap in foil. If you can, wait at least a day or two before slicing and eating.

The new best-ever Jewish Honey Cake, sinkholes and all

Last fall, I made a wonderful honey cake for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. I was attempting a low-sodium adaptation of a recipe by the great food writer Claudia Roden. To my surprise, it turned out to be the best honey cake I had ever made.

This year, I have a new candidate: Last year's recipe, made the right way!

A few weeks ago, I decided to make that wonderful honey cake again, with a few changes. The biggest one: regular leavening instead of the low-sodium adaptation. Instead of last year's plain cake, I took Roden's suggestion and added some walnuts and dried fruit. (I used cranberries instead of raisins.) As before, I used brown sugar instead of white, increased the spices, and used orange juice along with coffee. One unplanned change: half olive oil, because I ran out of vegetable oil. Finally, to save time, I baked the cake in three small loaf pans instead of a single large springform pan.

At first, the loaves rose nicely. But somewhere along the line, that dark liquid mass heaved, rolled, and fell. When I removed the honey cake from the oven, each loaf had a deep crack in the middle.  Actually, it looked more like a crater. Or like those sinkholes ("ponikve") that are common to the karst landscape in the region of Slovenia where my ancestors once lived.

I was baffled. Why had my honey cake risen so well last year, despite the always-risky substitution of those less-potent low sodium leaveners?  I didn't have time to fret about it, because I had to rush off to a Cajun music gig up north, at a winery in the hills of Napa county.

That night, we decided to try the honey cake, even though it had aged less then ten hours.

To my surprise, those misshapen slices were delicious! They were moist. Fully cooked in the center, too. The flavor was deep, dark, and tangy. The nuts and dried fruit were a fine addition. The olive oil seemed to add depth.

My husband thought it was the best honey cake he had ever tasted.

I did a little research and soon learned that sunken honey cakes are a problem for many people--even the popular food blogger Smitten Kitten.  She had also followed the honey cake recipe of a well-established Jewish baker. Her loaves were as cratered as mine.

Although it seems counterintuitive, the most frequent cause of sunken cakes is over-rising, often because of too much leavening. Smitten Kitten discovered her honey cake did better when she reduced the baking powder.

Curious, I went back to the original Claudia Roden recipe. Oh-oh. I had made an error, when I included her "regular leavening" instructions in last year's post. Roden called for 2 teaspoons of regular baking powder and 1/2  teaspoon of baking soda, but I had reversed it in my blog post.

Mystery solved!  I had followed my own misdirections and used 2 teaspoons of baking soda and 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder. No wonder my honey cakes were over-leavened.

I have corrected the error in last year's blog post and in the recipe below. But it is hard to go wrong with this forgiving recipe.

Dober tek!

And, if you are celebrating, Happy New Year.

Best-ever Jewish Honey Cake  (adapted from Claudia Roden)

2 eggs
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup oil (I used half olive oil)
1 cup dark honey
2 T. rum
1/4 cup warm coffee
1/4 cup orange juice
2 cups white flour
1-1/2 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. cloves
1 t. ginger
2 t. baking powder
1/2 t. baking soda
pinch of salt
1/2 cup walnuts, broken and 1/3 cup dried cranberries (optional)

(Low sodium option: use 4 t. low sodium baking soda and omit the salt.)



First, prepare pan. Line a 9-inch spring form pan with foil, then oil and dust with flour. Or use three small loaf pans, 3 x 7 inches. Set aside. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a medium-sized bowl, mix together the flour, spices, baking powder, and baking soda. Set aside.

In a small bowl, toss walnuts and cranberries (or raisins, the more traditional choice) in a little flour to coat. Set aside.

In a large bowl, beat eggs with sugar until thick and lemon-colored. Add oil, honey, rum, coffee, and orange juice. Beat until smooth. Add dry ingredients slowly to liquid ingredients, beating until smooth. Finally, fold in the optional nuts and cranberries.

Pour batter into prepared pan(s). Bake at 350 degrees until top is firm and springs back when touched, about 45 minutes for small loaf pans for 1 hour and 15 minutes for a large spring form pan. Let cool on a rack. When cool, wrap in foil. If you can, wait at least a day or two before slicing and eating.

Two Favorites for the Jewish New Year: Best-Ever Honey Cake and Murray's Kreplach, Revisited

This holiday season has brought new twists to two traditional Jewish favorites.  Murray's Chicken-Beef Kreplach has found an even wider audience. And I made my first low-sodium honey cake.

Murray's Chicken-Beef Kreplach

Big thanks to Barbara Rolek, the resident Eastern European food expert over at About.com, for featuring Murray's Kreplach on her comprehensive and fascinating cooking site. You can find her story about my father-in-law's kreplach recipe here, along with many other excellent resources. I am happy to report that Barbara (unlike me) made it the ultra-traditional way, complete with schmaltz and salt!

This all came about when I discovered that Barbara, who is of Polish descent, is a distant DNA cousin of my Slovenian American mom--at least according to 23andMe, the genetic genealogy testing service we both used. It was a wonderful coincidence, since we already had connected around our overlapping culinary interests. Barbara includes "Slovenian Roots Quest" in her list of Eastern European food blogs. I have often consulted her site for help with Balkan food that is outside the Slovenian tradition, like her Serbian flatbread recipe.

You can find my original post about Murray's Kreplach here, and the low-sodium version I eventually prepared here. The next time, I may follow Barbara's example and try it--just once--with chicken fat and a touch of salt!

Honey Cake

Some people joke that honey cake, a traditional new year sweet served at Rosh Hashanah, is just like Christmas fruitcake: it lasts forever because no one really likes to eat it!  But I love a good honey cake and often experiment with new recipes. This year, I took on a new challenge: to come up with a low-sodium version. I decided to adapt a recipe I found in one of my favorite cookbooks, The Book of Jewish Food, by famed British food writer Claudia Roden, who grew up in Cairo's once-flourishing Jewish community.

Roden's book, winner of the 1996 James Beard award, is a standout for a few reasons. Her intelligent writing draws on considerable research, rich history and personal reflection. She was probably the first food writer to focus on the lesser known parts of the Jewish diaspora: the Sephardi and Mizrahi communities, whose original homes were in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Roden's original recipe can be be found here. This style of honey cake or lekach is actually from the more familiar Ashkenazi tradition, which draws heavily on Central and Eastern European cooking styles.

To turn this dish into a low-sodium version, my first step (the easy one) was to simply omit the "pinch of salt" Roden suggests. The real challenge, as always, was in the leavening. She calls for baking soda and baking powder, both high in sodium. So I would have to substitute a low-sodium baking soda and then figure out what sort of acidic agent to add, in order to duplicate the effect of baking powder.

From past experience, I knew that figuring out exact quantities for the low-sodium substitute can be tricky. (The usual suggestion, to double it, isn't always sufficient.) It is also important to bake quickly once the ingredients are mixed, since low-sodium baking soda is single-acting.

Here are the changes I made to Roden's recipe:  I was generous with the baking soda. To give it an extra boost, I added two acidic ingredients, brown sugar instead of white and orange juice to replace half the coffee. To enhance the flavor, I increased the spices: more cinnamon and cloves plus some ginger added to the mix. I skipped the nuts, raisins, and orange rind to save time, but perhaps this also helped by eliminating extra weight.

Even honey cake devotees will concede that getting the right texture can be a challenge. The cake can be too heavy, too underdone, or too dry. Sometimes it inflates and deflates during baking and ends up with a big sinkhole in the middle. So I had plenty of worries about my low-sodium adaptation--especially when I discovered that I had forgotten to turn on the oven! I lost precious minutes waiting for the oven to heat up, while I watched the unbaked batter starting to bubble away on the counter.  Finally, I gave up and popped it in before the oven was fully heated.

For the recipe and the results, read on.

Honey Cake

Jewish Honey Cake or Lekach  (low sodium, adapted from Claudia Roden)

2 eggs
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup oil
1 cup dark honey
2 T. rum
1/4 cup warm coffee
1/4 cup orange juice
2 cups white flour
1-1/2 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. cloves
1 t. ginger
4 t. low sodium baking soda

(Higher sodium option:  2 t. regular baking soda and 1/2 t. baking powder, plus pinch of salt)

CORRECTION: Roden's original recipe calls for 2 t. baking powder and 1/2 t. baking soda.
(I got it reversed!)  See complete updated recipe here.


First, prepare pan. Line a 9-inch spring form pan with foil.  Oil and dust with flour.  Set aside. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a medium-sized bowl, mix together the flour, spices and baking soda. Set aside.

In a large bowl, beat eggs with sugar until thick and lemon-colored. Add oil, honey, rum, coffee, and orange juice. Beat until smooth. Add dry ingredients slowly to liquid ingredients, beating until smooth.

Pour batter into prepared pan. Bake at 350 degrees for about 1 hour and 15 minutes, until top is firm and springs back when touched.  Let cool on a rack. When cool, wrap in foil. If you can, wait at least a day or two (or three) before slicing and eating.

Honey Cake

The result? This was the most successful honey cake I have ever made. It was moist and flavorful, with an intriguing flavor of burnt sugar.  I have never found a single "best" recipe for honey cake.  But this may be it.

I have no idea why this particular recipe worked out so well. Perhaps the foundation, Claudia Roden's recipe, uses slightly different proportions of the basic ingredients that are common to the many other recipes I have tried. Was it the imported wildflower honey from Germany?  Using a round cake pan instead of my usual loaf?  Whatever the mysterious alchemy at work, I hope it can be duplicated the next time I have an urge for honey cake.


UPDATE: I made this recipe the following year, without the low sodium adaptation.  It was even better--despite a little over-leavening!  Go here to see the full post.

Putizza di Noci: Slovenian-Italian-Jewish Fusion = Chocolate Potica!

I did a double-take when I first came across a recipe called Putizza di Noci, or Trieste Yeast Roll, in The Book of Jewish Food, by the noted food writer Claudia Roden, who grew up in Cairo.

Roden described it as a favorite family dessert for Rosh Hashanah, or Jewish New Year. But there was no denying it: This was an Italian version of  Slovenian potica—with a filling of nuts and chocolate.

The source of the recipe, according to Roden, was the family's "Slavic nanny" from Trieste.

This improbable story left me shaking my head. But now, a decade later, it makes more sense.

Trieste, a cosmopolitan city, had been home to Italians, Jews, Slovenians and Croatians. It fell within the borders of Yugoslavia until after World War II, when it became part of Italy. Putizza was—and still is—a famous specialty of Trieste.  It became a Rosh Hashanah tradition in the city's once-sizeable Jewish community.  But the roots of the dish are Slovenian.

I have also learned a little more about the nanny, Maria Koron. She came from a small Slovenian village near Trieste.  It was in a border region known as Gorizia in Italy, Gorica in Slovenia.  I suspect that she has a connection to a poignant story that is only recently becoming more widely known in Slovenia.

Maria was probably one of the so-called Aleksandrinke.  They were young Slovenian women who left their impoverished region to work as maids, nannies, and wet nurses for wealthy families in Cairo and Alexandria.  They faced difficult circumstances, both in Egypt and when they returned home. 

Five or six years ago, I tried to make putizza di noci, using Claudia Roden's recipe.

The yeast dough was different from my family recipe.  No sour cream and no overnight rising in the refrigerator. I had never heard of a chocolate-nut filling for potica, much less attempted one.  And since it was Rosh Hashanah, I followed her suggestion of making the traditional holiday shape: coiled into a round, and baked in a bundt pan.  This is also the traditional shape in Slovenia, although my family has always favored a simple loaf.

That first attempt was a failure.  Dense and overbaked. Nothing I cared to repeat.

But when Rosh Hashanah came around this year, I decided to make one more attempt at this Slovenian-Jewish-Italian recipe.

I decided to stick with my family's familiar potica dough recipe. After all, there is nothing sacred about that part of Claudia Roden's recipe.  There are many different versions of potica dough.  The critical difference, I figured, was in the filling.   I also decided to use the simple loaf shape, also an option in Roden's recipe.

I made a half recipe of my family’s traditional refrigerator yeast dough, enough for two loaves.  I followed Claudia Roden’s filling recipe, with one change. Instead of the milk or wine her recipe calls for,  I used evaporated milk, because that is all we had on hand.

For the result, read on.

Putizza di Noci

For the dough: Make a half recipe of potica dough, which you can find in the next post, here. Prepare the dough as directed, using half the quantities specified.  Form into two rounds, wrap, and refrigerate overnight.


For the filling:

1 c. evaporated milk
1-1/4 c. sugar
2-1/2 c. finely chopped walnuts
grated zest of 1 lemon
7 oz. bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped

Mix milk and sugar in medium sauce pan and bring to a boil.  And the nuts and lemon zest and simmer 10 more minutes, stirring.  Let cool. Filling will be very thick and almost carmelized.

Chop the chocolate finely.  (I used bittersweet chocolate chips, and chopped them in a food processor.)  Set aside.

To assemble:

Roll out each piece of dough as for potica, about 1/8 inch thick.  For detailed directions, go here.

Cover dough surface with filling and spread if possible.  I found the filling too thick to spread completely and had to dab it on.  Sprinkle on chocolate.  Roll up as directed. Pinch the seams, using water to seal.

Place each long roll on a baking sheet that is covered with parchment.  Curve each loaf to fit on pan.

Let rise 1-1/4 hour.  Bake at 350 degrees for 30-45 minutes.  If loaves begin to get too dark, cover with foil after 30 minutes. Let cool before slicing.

We served the putizza as the finale to our Rosh Hashanah dinner.

My mother loved the dinner.  All except for the putizza.  As usual, she didn’t mince words. She didn’t much care for that peculiar chocolate filling.

But I liked it.

My husband loved it. He said it reminded him of a childhood favorite: babka, a traditional Eastern European Jewish yeast pastry with a rich chocolate-nut filling.

He was right. We couldn’t quite figure out what gave the putizza that elusive flavor. Something about the bittersweet chocolate?   Or maybe it was the cooked filling, with the caramel flavor from the evaporated milk.  It was another one of those cooking mysteries, when the flavors of the past are suddenly recreated.

I think putizza will become a yearly tradition at our house, for Rosh Hashanah and maybe even for Christmas.