cteavin

Success! I can kick myself for not taking a photo but essentially you can make a genoise with honey. The batches I made with 50 grams of flour were much more moist but there was no true grain to the cake. It was more like the webbing you might find inside a cream puff. This cake still has a "skin" but much, much, much thinner. I've tried a piece with and without. With this top crust it gives the sensation that the cake is dryer than it is. I then peeled off this crust and could see a beautiful crumb underneath that is very moist. It's not really presentation ready but it's good enough that I can start thinking ways to make this into a proper dessert. Still, I'm going to make another batch later with less flour and maybe another with 100 grams of flour and three eggs measured to 180 grams to see what changes. I should add to anyone who might want to bake this that I'm in Japan so I'm limited to UNBLEACHED flour.

Hi Judith, thanks for looking in your reference books. Duck eggs is really a shorthand for 'other than chicken'. It's been a long time but in civics classes once upon a time I remember learning that the Romans bread all types of birds and that eggs were scarce by modern standards being most plentiful in spring (I believe). In other 'classic' recipes they prefer duck eggs saying the yolk is larger and fat content higher, so I wrote duck. @Blether, I'm going to find a copy of that book and order it tonight. It sounds right up my alley. I'm baking a new version as I type. Since one large egg here is 60 grams I've used 2 whole eggs plus 3 egg yolks (bleeding off a little white) to measure 180 grams hoping to lessen the amount of liquid in the batter, I've also doubled the flour and changed it to AP. We'll see. The batter reached ribbon stage much faster than before. If this works, I'll make another version with chocolate. If it doesn't work I'll try again with less honey, perhaps a 50/50 split of sugar to honey to see what that does. It's nice to have such simple pleasures.

What kind of troubles have you been having? What percentage of cocoa does the chocolate you're using have and are you adding either butter, shortening or wax to it before you dip? Are you tempering the chocolate or just melting it? Is what you're dipping room temperature or cold? and Are you dipping with forks, literally by hand or by some other means? All of this will affect the finished product.

It's impossible to have a perfect reproduction. The types of flours have literally evolved, how poultry is raised today yields eggs with slightly different chemical structures, etc. A true food historian would have to be well versed in the region and do a lot of educated guessing. I think the closer you get to our modern period the better the chances of having a more "authentic" product which is one of the reasons why I love the work the people at Goode Cookery have done. For me, I look to the past for inspiration. My feeling is that people today rely to much on formula and too little on their senses: even variations in the amount of sunshine will cause slight variations in the final wheat berries that we use in the various flours around the planet, so a recipe that worked in the 70's in America with bleached flour will produce a different result than the soft unbleached wheat we get in Japan -- but it takes a lot of practice to get that kind of feel for cooking. Still, I think it's a worthy goal. The honey cake is interesting for a couple of reasons. The proportion of the ingredients, the use of honey in place of sugar, the spelt flour. It makes me think about how I can play with the texture of cake. I'm going to have to order one of those books. I have a pretty good collection myself. I've read that boiling the honey now is unnecessary but do you think it changed your results? I like the idea of using barely but I'd guess there'd be little or no rise. Was it yeasted? I was playing with a "breakfast cake" this summer that used corn meal in the batter. The texture was too corse and dry for me so I switched to quinoa and increased the BP. The grains swelled and added a nice bite. The extra nutrition felt fight for a breakfast cake. I've thought about using wheat berries but maybe barley would be good, too. I baked two versions with regular cake flour yesterday with similar results. The cake as smoother on the palate and a little more bland; I'm guessing one of the properties of a lot of honey in baking is a skin. It's Saturday here. I bake or not to bake, that is the question.

If she can beat the eggs by hand she can defend herself in any situation with the guns she must have. The original recipe only says to combine the ingredients and who ever translated the recipe, I'm assuming from experience in that era and regions cooking style, said to beat vigorously by hand. The eggs leaven the cake, so it made sense to me to try it first in the style of a genoise. I was also curious to see what would happen. Theresa might be right about separating the eggs. If I whip air into the yolks and honey and then add the flour and might lighten it enough to keep the egg whites from deflating. But what about developing the gluten in the flour (by beating) to help support the structure?

From what I've seen from those two websites and the actual text from online copies of the original work proportions are not specifically noted; however, I've seen the proportions noted in the recipe in many different places. Is it a case of copy and paste? Perhaps, but whatever the case they intend for their to be a higher ratio of honey to flour and honey to egg. My best guess is that in the original recipes they would have used duck eggs. If chicken eggs were used they would have been "free-range", so I'm positive their yolk/white ratio would be different. I would guess that the person who remade the recipe took that into account. Still, I'm going to increase the number of yolks the next time I make it. As for the cake, it is definitely nothing like a pudding. What I made had a moist yellow-orange webbing that reminded me of popovers. My best guess is the the acid in the abundance of honey sets the eggs. I wish it set the proteins faster so as to keep the height. About taste, because I'm playing now I'm using very cheep honey. The flavors are not coming through. When I get a good cake going I'm thinking either cardamon and rose or citrus zest would be good pairings for the honey but you're right about it being a good showcase for a pure honey flavor. One final thought, would I be able to cut baking time if I reduced the moisture in the egg whites by 'aging' them for a few day outside their shells?

Hi, I've long been a fan of using old recipes, mostly from medieval Europe but this time I've gone a bit further back with the help of two websites (web links posted at the bottom). It is impossible to recreate the recipes because the quality and types of flour, eggs, and honey are very different but I'd still like to pull a decent cake from the idea. In fact, yesterday made this cake twice and the first version, the pure reproduction, was delicious but presentation was terrible. The recipe is: 3 eggs 200 grams honey 50 grams spelt flour for the first batter I whipped the eggs and honey just as I would for a genoise. I heated the mixture then beat it on high for 2 minutes the medium for 10 more minutes until it was cool and reached the ribbon stage. The volume of the batter was excellent. I baked it for 45 minutes and in the oven it had a beautiful dome. Unfortunately it fell after I removed it from the oven. Later, I saw that the part of the cake that formed the dome became a brown skin I could peel off to reveal a delectable, moist cake. Really, it was very good. I then remade the cake adding in 50 grams of almond flour hoping to give it structure without adding in extra protein. It maintained more of it's height and it had a nice bite but it the topmost part was dry and there was still a "skin" though it was more firmly attached to the cake. I would love to bake fifty variations to see what I come up with but that's not really possible. I was hoping some people here could suggest some ways to help the cake keep it's height while keeping honey as the main sugar. I was thinking to change the method of beating; use a larger, shallower pan; using a flour with a higher protein content. What do you all think? Thank you much, steven http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/roman/fetch-recipe.php?rid=roman-honey-cakes http://www.history.uk.com/recipes/index.php?archive=10

Ah, this site is back online. I love to cook. Coming from Los Angeles the goal was low fat, low carb, low sugar and as densely packed with nutrition as you could get. That's my base. Even the restaurants in L.A. follow those tenants; it wasn't until I started to travel that I tasted foods, like Creme Brule, as they were intended and only after I started making the real thing side by side the knock off that I understood how great the differences were. Still, I do get some satisfaction in playing with a recipe and finding variations that work (for me) and that's kind of where my hobby is today: I try as best I can to master the original then I cut this and add that to see the results. As for katakuriko, I learned from books by RLB, Paul Healy, Shirley Corriher, and other, about adjusting the protein content with starches and it's a tremendous success. One of the best recipes from The Cake Bible is RLB's crepes using only corn starch. Brilliant every time. I wish I had the space for a 10K bag of flour! As it is, I keep about ten different flours in my pantry for a couple of kilos of this and a few kilos of that. And in the U.S., bleached is the norm. Sugar, I superfine it in the food processor but I use different "cuts" depending on the baked good, for example large grains are excellent on the outside of a sugar cookie for decoration or inside to help limit spread. Do you -- or does anyone -- have a Japanese baking book or author they can recommend? Kanji isn't really an issue. Finally, @ helenjp, since you asked about books, I strongly recommend Bakewise and Cookwise. I just bought a book about Japanese seasonal cooking called 英語で売る和食 as a primer. Not bad as I never cook Japanese food. I've long had someone in my life that prefers to do the 和食。　；)

Hi, I love to experiment in the kitchen. What I'm looking to test are pastries and cakes with high ratios of graham flour and/ bean flours mixed with gluten powder to (hopefully) make up for the difference with the decrease in the protein from wheat flour. I'm doing the research now before I start testing recipes and wanted to know if anyone has tried this or something similar and ask what the results were. Also, if anyone has any knowledge to pass down, I'm all eyes (as this is all reading). Cheers,

First of all, let me say that this is my first post here and I'm hoping to become an active member as I love to cook and learn about cooking. I'm a long term resident of Japan and I've been getting deeper and deeper into baking over the past couple of years, starting with French (thank you Julia Child) and now going westward. Long story short, I'm really good with stream risen cakes like genoise or the flourless and meringue based cakes but I've not been able to make a decent high ratio cake. Then I found out why: Japan doesn't sell bleached flours; the flour I've been using is unbleached whereas the recipes were written for bleached. If you don't know about Kate Flour, I'll suggest you look it up on the web. Kate is an inspiration. A hobby cook, she discovered a technique for mimicking the properties of bleached flour. I'm curious if anyone here, living in Japan, has tried Kate Flour or if they've found a way to get bleached flour. I'd also love to hear what kind of pastries and cakes people are baking and where they're getting their recipes and where they're buying their flour and other baking ingredients. Myself, I use Tomizawa-san and sometimes order online through Rakuten. Cheers, Steven