Medovníky are “honey cookies” and probably one of my all-time favorite Slovak cookies. Why? Because they have some of my favorite ingredients – honey, cinnamon, and cloves. Medovníky are a popular cookie to have on hand at Christmas time, but really you can find them all year round. That’s because in addition to being good to eat, they are often decorated beautifully with white-colored icing. They also look good just with a walnut half on top. Or since they are cut out with cookie cutters, the shape alone can be all the decoration you need.

I’m not a native Slovak but during the five years I lived and worked in Slovakia, I tasted many variations of medovník. In making it myself at home, it was a bit of a challenge to reproduce from Slovak recipes, however, because often times one of the ingredients is a pre-packaged powder called prášok do perníka. This powder is a mix of spices that you’d put into your recipes for gingerbread cake or medovníky, for example.

In trying to reproduce those flavors from the combination of spices, I’ve come up with the following tried and tested recipe. Just one note, however. These are flavorful cookies. If you don’t like one of the spices used, simply put less.

Here’s what you need to make the dough:

• 4 ¼ cups flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 ¼ sticks of unsalted butter
• 3 ½ tablespoons of honey
• a little less than ½ cup of water
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 ½ tablespoons cinnamon
• ½ tablespoon ginger
• ½ tablespoon cloves
• 1 teaspoon cardamom (optional)

Start with heating the sugar, water and honey in a sauce pan until the sugar dissolves. Add the butter and spices. Once the butter has melted, let it cool. In a large bowl, combine the flour and baking soda. Pour the sugar-spice mixture over it and mix with a wooden spoon. Knead lightly to form a smooth dough. Wrap it in cling film and refrigerate for at least an hour (preferably overnight).

Ingredients for medovníky.

Dissolve the sugar and honey in water and then add the spices.

Add the mixture to a bowl containing the flour and baking soda.

Knead lightly to obtain smooth dough. Wrap it in seran wrap and let cool in the fridge overnight.

The Next Morning

Preheat your oven to 400 F. You are going to roll out a small amount of dough at a time on a floured board. The dough is going to be pretty stiff when it comes out of the refrigerator. You can work it with your hands until it “warms up” a bit or put in the amount you break off into the microwave on defrost for 30 seconds or so. You don’t want it warm really, just malleable. Flour your board lightly and roll out to about 3 to 4 milimeters. It’s up to you how thick you want your cookies to be. Cut out shapes with cookie cutters. Butter your baking sheet or use parchment paper so they don’t stick. Once they are in your baking sheet, you can decorate them with a quarter or a half of a walnut in the center. I’ve left mine as is so that I can decorate them with icing later.

Bake your cookies 5 to 8 minutes in length. These cook fast so keep an eye on them. I like my cookies darker. To me it gives them a richer flavor, so I let them go up to 7 minutes. Every oven is different so be attentive. These cookies can burn easily if you let them go too long. Once they are out, let them slightly cool before moving them.

My Slovak grandma-in-law brushes them with egg whites immediately after they’ve come out of the oven before they cool. This gives them a gloss and becomes something of a sealant to help keep in moisture so they don’t get too hard. I like the way they look without the shine so I skip this step.

To make the icing you need the following:

• 1 egg white
• 1 ½ cup powdered sugar
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice

Wisk the three ingredients together. I did half the powdered sugar and then the second half. I whisked until I could make stiff peaks with my icing. I had to add a bit more sugar to get the right consistancy.
You don’t need a fancy tool to work with icing. Simply spoon your icing into a sandwich bag, twist the bag tightly until the icing wedges into one corner, and then poke or cut a tiny hole into the corner. It’s not professional quality, but it works.

Make sure your cookies are completely cool before beginning to decorate.
Here’s what my cookies looked like when I finished. My design skills have a lot to be desired, but they turned out all right. And the taste? Just perfect.

The dough the following day. Roll it out and cut out your favorite shapes.

Medovníky after baking. If you don’t own an icing gun, put the icing in a ziploc bag and make a small cut in one corner.

The final decorated medovníky honey cakes.

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In this recipe, which comes from Varecha.sk, I show you how to make medové rezy, or honey slices. I have never made anything like this before, heck, it was just few weeks ago that I baked my first ever cake. If you had told me two years ago I will ever bake a cake of any kind, I would have told you were totally nuts. Yet here I am, making one of the most delicious Slovak rezy.

Slovakia fames itself on its many various delicious sweets, called koláče or zákusky. Koláče are generally things that your grandma would make, the simple but delicious home baked cakes and cookies. Zákusky on the other hand, are the elaborate cakes and pastries that you are more likely to find in the many cukráreň, or pastry shop. These are further subdivided into rezy (which means something like “cut-outs”) and torty) (tortes). If you ever find yourself in need of some culinary inspiration, just type in “rezy” into Slovak Google’s image search…

Here are the ingredients you’ll need, nothing fancy. Just one note. You should probably use cake flour, which is more similar to the Slovak hladká múka (smooth flour) specified by the recipe. But no worries if all you have is all purpose. That’s what I used and everyone I offered the bars to loved them.

Making the wafers

Combine 600g of flour (about 5 cups of flour, from this handy flour calculator) with 150g of powdered sugar, 2 tablespoons of cocoa, 3 tablespoons of honey, 50g (about half a stick) of melted butter and 3 eggs. This mixture will initially look like nothing that could ever turn into dough.

But keep working it, and it will eventually turn into a solid block with the consistency of play dough (plastelína). Form it into a cylinder and slice into 4 equal sections.

Roll out each section into a plate slightly larger than the bottom of your baking pan (mine is 13×9). To do this, first place a section onto a wooden board, which you have dusted with flour. The board should be bigger than your baking pan. Flatten the section with the back of your hand until you get a fat circular pancake. Then use your fingers to flatten it even more, making sure to close up any tears that form along the edges. Then roll the circle slightly more than the length of your baking pan. Turn the board 90 degrees and roll out in the other direction. Then place wax paper over the plate. Carefully flip the board over to remove the dough. Place it onto a baking pan turned upside down. Use a knife to cut off the dough sticking over the edges. Also use a fork to poke the dough in few places. This is done to keep it from puffing up. I ended up with enough left overs to make fifth plate.

Bake each slice for 8 minutes at 350F. I baked them one at a time.

The custard

Alright, the hard part is done. To make the custard filling, combine 0.5L (about 2.1cups) milk with 5 heaping tablespoons of corn starch. At least that was the recipe. I found I had to add another two tablespoons to have it solidify (perhaps I didn’t boil off enough of the milk). Boil all this together and then combine with 250g of powdered sugar, little bit of vanilla, a shot of rum, and another 250g of butter. That’s some 2.5 sticks – I think Julia Child would approve. Use a hand held blender to whip the custard.

Fill the layers

To assemble everything together, take one layer and spread the custard on it. Add another wafer and top this one with jam (raspberry or red currant if you can find it). Cover with the third layer and spread on the remaining custard. Then cover with the last wafer. At least that’s how it supposed to be done. I instead made WCJWJJWCJW (wafer/custard/jam/wafer and so on). Weigh the slices down with something like a sack of flour and let sit for several hours in a cool place. Initially, the wafers will be quite hard and crunchy, but will soften and taste very much like soft Graham Crackers.

Chocolate Topping

After the wafers have softened (such as the following day), top them them with a chocolate layer. Use a double boiler (one pot sitting in another one containing boiling water) to melt 4 squares of dark baking chocolate with half a stick of butter. I used 100% chocolate. Since this was too bitter, I added about 2 teaspoons worth of hot chocolate mix. The original recipe said to turn the cake over so you end up coating the layer that was on the bottom. I have no idea why you should do this, besides perhaps aesthetics. I ended up coating the top layer because it was more uniform.

Place in fridge (or freezer) to allow the chocolate to set. Serve by cutting out individual slices about inch wide and 3 inches long. You’ll end with about 50 of these. Boy, this thing was delicious!

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You can use the freshly baked rolls (čerstvé rožky) anywhere you would use regular bread. They go great with soups, spreads, and you can even turn them into a butter and cheese sandwich. Another of my favorites is to top them with butter and honey or jam, and make a quick mid-afternoon snack. Such a mid-afternoon meal is called olovrant in Slovak.

I feel almost silly posting this simple dish, but then, it shows some differences between Slovak and American cuisines. In Slovakia, we don’t have peanut butter. Or at least, there didn’t use to be peanut butter when I was growing up. It may be more common now, but the nut spread of choice is still Nutella. Jam is spread on regular butter. Although I very much like peanut butter, I don’t like to mix it with jam. The result is too sweet, in my opinion. Instead, I keep using regular unsalted butter, following the tradition I was raised on. Another very popular combination in Slovakia is butter with honey. Honey is also often squirted into warm milk to make a sweet, comforting drink.

Slice the rolls in half, spread on butter (maslo) and top with raspberry jam (malinový lekvár) or honey (med). Add a cup of hot chocolate (kakao) and you got yourself a little taste of paradise.

Speaking of honey, there is a great article on Martin Votruba’s University of Pittsburgh Slovak Studies page about the origin of the word medveď (meaning bear).

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