Gingerbread making with carved honeycake moulds

The “Carved Honeycake Moulds” workshop provides the unique opportunity to learn and experience how to make handmade traditional molded gingerbread/honeycake cookies with wooden moulds. Visitors will learn about the history of European and Hungarian gingerbread making, about the symbolic messages of motifs carved into hard wood gingerbread moulds. During the workshop we work with a unique collection of antique and newly carved wooden forms with religious and folk-art designs. Visitors can make, bake and wrap their own honeycake souvenirs. I share my knowledge and special honeycake dough recipe during the workshop.

Gingerbread making has a centuries old tradition in Hungary. Few people know, but colorful gingerbread cookies only appeared in the second half of the 19th century. Until then gingerbread was brown, rich in honey and moulded with hand carved wooden forms. The fancy red, colorful gingerbreads caused the moulded ones to disappear. Artistically carved moulds lost their role, ended up in attics, in museum warehouses. (They survived in a single town in Hungary, in town of Debrecen.) The beauty of carved patterns, the rich dough used for making moulded gingerbread deserves to be saved. The technique itself is beautifully simple, simply beautiful, the honeycake is a healthy slow food with natural ingredients, with long expiry date. Environment friendly food with special, magical power, comes from the works of the bees, from the symbols of carved moulds. We are just in time to save this beautiful tradition. Let’s work on it together!