Great Jewish Bake Off Week 1: Honey Cakes
As the first week closes we reflect on the whirlwind first week!
Let the Bake Off Commence!
A few months ago, we at the Jewish Museum London were watching the latest series of Great British Bake Off. We were very excited to come across Rainbow Bagel Week! (Or should that be Beigel) Safe to say we were sitting on our sofas watching the messes made and made the mistake of saying… we can do that!
Looking at Jewish History there is so much we could say about the community and their connections with food. Jewish food marks tradition, festival celebration, and has been a key staple of East End history. We decided to have a look in our stores to see what recipes we could find and voila! A treasure trove of Jewish heritage in the forms of recipe cards and cookbooks.
We contacted Manchester Jewish Museum to see if they would be interested in competing over the month of March in a weekly series of baking competitions where we both search in our collections for recipes and then have a member of staff bake (or attempt) to bake them.
Week 1: Fannie Prag’s Honey Cakes
The first week we had the choice to pick something from our collection for our first week and we chose from ‘Some Traditional Jewish Recipes’ by Fannie Prag 1933.
Honey Cake
Ingredients:
- 0.75 lb flour
- pinch of salt
- 1 tsp mixed spice
- 0.5 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 3 eggs
- 3 teaspoonfuls honey
- half lemon
- blanched almonds
Recipe
- Mix together the flour, salt, spice and soda
- Separate some of the white of one egg
- beat up the remainder of the egg with the two other eggs
- Add to the other ingredients with the honey and rind and juice of lemon
- turn on to a floured board
- Roll out to 0.25 inch thickness
- Cut into fancy shapes, brush over with reserved white of egg and decorate with almonds
- Bake for 12 minutes regulo mark 4 (Gas mark 4)
Jewish Museum London Attempt- Helen
I liked this recipe as I am an amateur baker, it was quite easy to make (even though I did suffer some casualties). I was very excited to show off my first successful bake ever! The mixed spices added an amazing smell to my kitchen and really added to the flavour. I might have over baked them as they came out a bit dry, but I cut one in half to have with Jam for an extra level of sweetness and it made a world of difference! This recipe is useful for those who aren’t confident in their baking skills but also leaves room for experimentation for those who are more confident! Adding more flavour and decoration! As you can see from Manchester’s photos, this is such a good recipe to do with family.
Manchester Jewish Museum Attempt- Max and Daniel
Max (and Kids!) and Daniel both absolutely blew us away with their bakes! The amazing shapes!
And the winner is….. MANCHESTER!
We happily accept that our friends at Manchester bested us this time! We will just have to even the score next week
Why don’t you try to bake your own honey cakes? Take some photos and post them using the hashtag #GreatJewishMuseumBakeOff
