This cake is butter, nut and honey heaven.  It is filled and covered with a rich butter cream caramel and nuts.  A truly traditional Czech dessert!  The caramel is the easiest I’ve ever seen and the hard cookies turn into a soft moist rich cake.

Cake

• 450 grams Flour
• 180 grams Icing Sugar
• 180 grams Unsalted Butter
• 1 Egg
• 1 ½ teaspoon Baking Soda
• 6 tablespoons Honey
• 4 tablespoons Cream
• 1 teaspoon Cocoa Powder

In a double boiler warm mix with a hand mixer, the butter, sugar, egg, honey and cream for about 5 minutes.  In a separate bowl mix the flour, baking soda and cocoa powder.  Then mix the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and let sit for about 10 minutes covered with plastic wrap.  At this point it should be a nice cookie dough consistency and you should be able to roll it out onto parchment paper without it sticking.  If it’s too sticky then let sit another 5-10 minutes or use a little bit of flour to keep from sticking.

On parchment paper draw an 8 inch circle and roll out approximately 160 grams of dough into a circle onto the paper to bake.  Roll out 8 same sized circles and bake each one for 6 to 7 minutes at 350 degrees.

Once they are baked set aside and cool on wire rack.  These can be baked ahead of time and kept in fridge for up to a week or frozen for up to a month.

(The amount of dough will not be exact for the cookies, bake the extra amount and later grind it up with the nuts to coat the outside of the cake)

** Use the extra pieces of cookie and once baked, grind with nuts to use to cover the completed cake.

Caramel Cream

• 1 Can Sweetened Condensed Milk
• 200 grams of Unsalted Butter
• 70 grams roughly chopped walnuts or pecans

To make the cream you must first boil the can of sweetened condensed milk for 3 hours, in the can.  The timing for this is not exact, but the longer you boil the darker the caramel becomes.  I boiled mine for 3 hours and it came out a nice rich caramel color.  Do not open until several hours later when the can has cooled sufficiently.  I would boil the day before I want to use it.  This process caramelizes the milk.  You can boil several of these, as they will keep for as long as the canned milk would.

Once you have the caramelized milk, blend 1 can with the butter until creamy. This will be used between the layers and to coat the cake.

Secret Ingredient

• 1 ½ Tablespoons of Sugar
• 150 ml of Water
• 50 ml of Rum (or more depending on taste, with this amount you won’t actually taste the rum)

Mix the rum, sugar and water in a bowl and reserve.

Assembly

Layer the cookies thus, lay the first one on a plate, and brush the rum water on the top of the cookie then cover with cream and sprinkle with the chopped nuts.  Brush both sides of the second and subsequent cookies with the rum water and cover with the caramel butter and nuts until all the cookies have been layered.

Cover the whole cake with the caramel cream and then with the cake/cookie crumbs and nuts.  Place in the fridge for a least 4 hours or overnight to set and allow the cream to soak into the cookies to ensure that it isn’t crunchy. Once the cream soaks into the cake and it has had a chance to sit, it will remain moist and perfect for over a week in the fridge even uncovered.

Yummy!

*  Post translated from ekucharka.com