Gluten Free "Little Bee" Honey Cake

A sweet fragrant cake from the wild wild east.

Hi friends,

This cake Albinița (or Albinuța) “little bee” in Romanian is a fan fave around my house. This is part of a genre of cakes in Romania that are always served already cut into little squares as you see above. It’s the kind of cake that people pull out when you are visiting to have with coffee (a lovely tradition I truly enjoy).

It’s similar to the famous honey cakes of neighboring Ukraine. For my husband, it’s a flavor of his youth. Cakes that dominated the local shops before (absolutely lovely, just different) Western European flavors entered the market.

For me, it reminds me of my Romanian wedding. My parents, an aunt, and two uncles made the trip to the Carpathians for the event. My in-laws housed them in a neighbor’s apartment who lived in Italy. A house completely covered in small tabletop crystal decorations. So many people brought over cakes (this one and other flavors all cut into little squares) for the visiting Americans that their refrigerators filled and overfilled. Cakes kept coming and coming with grandmas and aunties dropping them off as a lovely welcoming gesture. We fed them cakes day and night and cakes were still going bad as we couldn’t eat them fast enough and had no room to shield them from the July Balkan heat. It felt like a cake explosion!

If you’re interested in more Romanian flavors, I cannot recommend Irina Georgescu’s newsletter and books enough. They are treasures!

Chips for breakfast

I’m calling it a cake, but really it’s more like an ice box cake. The layers are really a honey biscuit or cookie that from this midwestern American’s eyes really a honey graham cracker. Feel free to make the layers and cut them into rectangles for use as honey graham crackers in your s’mores or to dip in milk. They are delightful that way - much better than commercially available GF grahams in my opinion!

For this cake, the honey cookie layers are alternated with a vanilla cream filling and jam. The cake can be eaten right after you assemble but it’s about 800% better if you let the cookies soften with the cream and jam and become a sliceable cohesive cake.

I drove around town to all of the East European grocers to find rosehip jam for this cake; however, unless you have a particular nostalgia for that flavor, you can make just as lovely a honey cake with plum jam or raspberry. As long as you use something with a little tartness, you are on the right track.

This feels perfect for spring, with all of the honey bees and flowers popping up. I love that you can change the flavor of the cake with the type of honey. Clover honey is the most easily accessible at the grocery store here, but in Romania, linden honey is very popular. It’s a light, almost clear honey sold in roadside stands all through the mountains. A darker honey takes this in a totally different direction, but equally delicious!!

Happy Baking,

Rachel

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P.S. Check out this cookbook my husband just brought back from a recent trip to Romania with my youngest child! It’s a treasure from the (seemingly different world of) 1990’s, full of history, recipes, and even old photo inserts!

Below is one of my signature gluten free recipes!

Gluten Free Little Bee Cake

yield: 1 small cake of 12 slices