Ok, I have to admit I had trouble getting too excited for Around the World in 12 Dishes and I had an even harder time getting Hazel interested. As a result, we are posting a week late. Sorry!! I think the reason is I had a hard time finding books and really anything on Croatia besides things on-line. Our library network literally had six books having to do with Croatia in all the Children's Departments. One of the six was a novel and one was a picture book that never mentioned Croatia and the rest were the non-fiction books about Croatia. We did not read a whole lot about the country this month. However I did write the introduction on the Around the World in 12 Dishes blog.
I think the main problem for getting materials is Croatia became independent again in the 1990's. There just is not much on Croatia out there because of its newness. I did find several sites with Croatian recipes. We decided on a recipe from Honest Cooking called Croatian Honey Pie. One of the sites explained that what we call cake they call pie in Croatia. Since the measurements are given in ounces and grams, we weighed most ingredients. I will give you my estimates however. I also could not find plum jam, so we used homemade strawberry and blueberry jams (we made it on Memorial Day, so we went for the red, white and blue theme).
Croatian Honey Pie (adapted from Honest Cooking)
Ingredients
For the Dough
- Just under 3 cups of all-purpose flour
- 2 eggs
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 2 tablespoons honey
- 3 tablespoons almond milk (we try to have things dairy-free for Hazel)
- just under a cup of sugar
- 1 teaspoon baking powder (I didn't read the recipe very well and used powder instead of soda)
- pinch of salt
- 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1 1/4 cups almond milk
- just under a cup of sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 3 tablespoons cornstarch
- the rest of the stick of butter and another stick
- jam
- Make the filling first, so it can cool. In a saucepan combine one cup of the milk with sugar and vanilla extract. Heat it until it boils. Combine 1/4 cup of milk with the cornstarch. Add this to the boiling milk and cook until it thickens stirring constantly. Cover the surface with plastic wrap and let cool to room temperature.
- Prepare dough. Combine one egg, butter, honey, sugar and milk in a saucepan. Heat until all ingredients dissolve.
- In a separate bowl, combine flour, salt, cinnamon and baking powder. Add melted mixture to flour mixture and the remaining egg. Knead it until it forms a dough.
- Divide dough into two equal parts. Roll each one out on a lightly floured surface as thin as possible.
- Place on a parchment lined baking sheet.
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Bake for 7-10 minutes. Make sure not to over bake. Let cool completely then cut each into equal pieces.
- While it is baking, beat softened butter for filling until it is fluffy. Then add to the cooled filling from step 1. Combine well (I beat them both with the mixer to combine).
- To assemble, place a piece of the baked cake/biscuit and cover with half the filling. Put on second layer of cake and spread with jam (we used strawberry). Place third layer of cake. We spread this with blueberry jam and then covered with the rest of the filling. Top with final layer of cake.
- Place in refrigerator for a few hours. If you want to dust with powdered sugar and enjoy!
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