Pain d'Épices

Rye flour and honey with no butter and no egg in it at all, raised with bicarbonate and left three days before cutting.

Vegetarian, but not vegan — contains dairy (milk), honey.

Ingredients

• 250 g rye flour
• 100 g plain flour
• 300 g honey
• 100 ml milk
• 100 ml water
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon ground aniseed
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• zest of 1 orange
• 10 g bicarbonate of soda
• a pinch of salt

Method

1. THERE IS NO BUTTER AND NO EGG IN IT AT ALL, which is what separates this from every other spiced loaf. The honey is doing the work of both -- it is the fat substitute, the sugar and most of the liquid, which is why there is three hundred grams of it and why it keeps for weeks. A version with butter and eggs in is a gingerbread cake, and a perfectly nice one, and not this.
2. THE HONEY IS WARMED WITH THE LIQUID AND COOLED BEFORE IT MEETS THE BICARBONATE. Warm honey pours and mixes; cold honey sits in a lump and takes the flour down with it. But poured hot onto bicarbonate it fizzes and spends its lift on the worktop instead of in the oven.
3. IT IS RYE, AND MOSTLY RYE. Rye has almost no gluten, so the loaf is dense and close by design rather than by accident -- it should be sliceable thin without crumbling. Made with wheat alone it rises more and tastes thinner.
4. AND IT IS LEFT THREE DAYS BEFORE CUTTING, wrapped. On the day it is baked it is dry and the spices sit separately; by the third day the honey has drawn moisture back through it and it is sticky and tastes of one thing. This is not storage advice, it is part of the method.
5. BAKED LOW AND SLOW. Honey burns long before a cake this dense is cooked, so 150C for an hour and a quarter, covered with foil once it has coloured.
6. Honey, milk and water warmed together in a pan until the honey is loose and the mixture is smooth. Taken off and COOLED to barely warm.
7. Rye flour, plain flour, all the spices, the orange zest and the salt whisked together in a bowl.
8. The bicarbonate whisked into the dry mixture, not the wet.
9. The cooled honey liquid poured in and stirred to a thick smooth batter. Stirred only until combined.
10. Poured into a lined 1 kg loaf tin.
11. Baked at 150C for 1 hour 15 minutes, covered with foil after 40 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean.
12. Cooled completely in the tin.
13. WRAPPED TIGHTLY in greaseproof and foil and LEFT THREE DAYS before cutting.
14. Cut in thin slices. Keeps three weeks wrapped, and gets better for the first of them.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under France · All recipes