Dark Rye and Honey Cake

Regula Ysewijn · Dark Rye and Honey Cake

This sugar and custard tart has an excellent velvet-like mouthfeel with the sandy sugar topping as a contrast. One of our contestants on Bake Off in Flanders was from the Flemish Limburg region, where vlaai are most popular today. Four years later I found myself by chance in the bakery where she buys her favourite vlaai and I talked to the baker. After I tasted it, it is now a firm favourite in our house too. The potsuiker in the name translates to ‘bowl of sugar’, which is rather interesting as potsuyckere was used as the name for sugar scraped from solid sugar loaves (cones) in 15th-century cookery texts. In Een notabel boecxken van cokeryen, the first printed cookery book in Dutch, I found saenvladen, a flan-like custard tart (without a crust) sweetened with potsuyckere. The recipe right before it in the same book is gouwieren, a cheese and egg bake — it’s unclear if it has a crust or not — topped with egg yolks and sugar. After it is baked, potsuyckere is added on top. Maybe a rea