Nobody could mistake me for a person who moves quickly. It took us 3. In my defense, in that period of time, I moved apartments , had a kid , wrote a book , and went on a city book tour , all while mostly keeping up with this here website and spending a truly horrific amount of time staring slack-jawed social media ahem , maintaining occasional hobbies.
The only thing left to do was go it alone, researching obsessively along the way. What everyone seemed to agree on was that the cake was a yeasted one, baked round or in a sheet pan, barely sweet, but topped with a crunchy almond-honey-butter caramel. Needless to say, this has not been stung. Who knew?! The cake was otherwise delicious, but the batter too wet to even consider doming, yeast issues aside, and the topping was sad and pale.
It was too sweet and needed more salt. Round 3 looked like the platonic ideal of a bee sting cake, but the filling was too soft and the cake too hard. In Round 4, I decided that the wet batter might have been onto something, and that was, the most tender cake of any of the rounds. Having no German grandmother peering over my shoulder to tell me which turns would doom any claims of authenticity forever, I decided that doming was overrated, and a tender, soft crumb was the only thing that would ever make me happy.
This was my favorite cake body, but I decided at the last minute to lighten the pastry cream with whipped cream and it … was so soft that it squeezed out the sides when you put the top half on, the way you always hope an overstuffed Oreo would but never does. This is a tender, yeasted lightly sweetened cake with a honey-almond-caramel crunch topping.
Needless to say, the topping is one of the best parts. This single-layer cake is split and filled with pastry cream; I used a thin amount about 1 cup but for a more traditional towering bienenstich which are often with halved cake layers and custard you might want to double the filling. How does this differ from other bee sting cakes out there? The cake itself has slightly more milk and slightly less flour than most recipes I saw; I preferred the more tender crumb.
