My not-so-sweet New Year wishes

MAZEL TOV to me! Sorry to blow my own shofar, but at long last the Jewish side of me has triumphed over the shiksa side.

It’s not that I have finally learned to read Hebrew well enough that I can follow the service without wanting to shout at our rabbi to slow it down a tad. I did study beginners’ Hebrew, I promise, but then they switched the class to a day I couldn’t do, leaving me forever stuck at the level of a new cheder pupil, painstakingly tracing out my aleph, bet, gimmel with a chubby crayon. The Husband tries to help, patiently moving his finger along the words to keep me in the right place during the service. He means well, but it makes me feel as if I’m wearing a sign round my neck: Not a Proper Jew.

And no, it’s not that the Teen has made me into a real Jewish mother either, by expressing an earnest wish to study hard so that he can become a doctor (his current ambition is to be a YouTube billionaire, although how he might get to that point without actually doing anything other than sprawling on the sofa in a one-to-one lovefest with his phone is currently a little hazy).

And no, I haven’t finally decided to have a batmitzvah: all that studying and the high point is having to sing unaccompanied in public? I don’t think so. The only time I’ve ever sung with more than one other person in earshot was at a karaoke bar. I had to be primed beforehand with multiple mojitos and even then I put on an orange wig and ‘50s cat’s-eye glasses so that I could feel like a completely different person. When my sister-in-law came back to our party from the loo, she thought I was one of the waitresses and asked me for a glass of Merlot and a dish of olives.

No, far more important than any of those — after years of failed attempts, I have finally succeeded in making a decent honey cake. We all know that a good Jewish woman (or even a fairly bad one, like me), even if she’s a crummy cook, must be able to make the Holy Trinity of Jewish dishes with aplomb: chicken soup, roast chicken (and trimmings) and honey cake. I don’t care how good your macaroons are for Pesach. So what you can turn out a creamy cheesecake for Shavuot? If you can’t make honey cake, then tsk! Shame on you.

In the past, my honey cake often had a deep dip in the centre, ideal only if you intended using the cake as an unusual edible bowl in which to serve houmous. Also, I know the main point of it is that it’s supposed to be sweet, but is it really supposed to make your tooth enamel beg for mercy as it starts to dissolve?

The two high priestesses of Jewish food, Evelyn Rose and Claudia Roden, both say that you need 250g of honey for just one Jewish honey cake. 250g! But their recipes also include strong black coffee, presumably to counteract some of the excessive sweetness. I hold both of them in high esteem but wouldn’t it be simpler to make the cake less sweet in the first place?

My sister-in-law Rachel and her sister Esther both make very good honey cake — though tradition dictates that, when setting the cake down on the table, the customary family blessing must be recited: “I don’t know what went wrong with it this year.”

As tradition is so important in Jewish life, I’d always assumed that I must stick to a traditional recipe. But then after a Rosh Hashanah tea where every scrunched-up paper napkin was found to be concealing an abandoned piece of my honey cake, I had to accept that in this case tradition might be more honoured in the breach than in the observance.

So I thought of the ginger cake I used to make for my dear, departed mum. It was her favourite cake: dark, rich and sticky, zinging with ginger, fragrant with cinnamon and ground cloves. I’ve tweaked the recipe so that it is sweetened with runny honey as well as with muscovado sugar and black treacle. The resulting cake is darker and significantly less sweet than a traditional honey cake, but importantly still feels like a honey cake. For me, the fact that it reminds me of my mother gives it a poignant note, which feels fitting at this time of year when our hope for a sweet year ahead is underpinned by solemnity and sorrow for our failings in the year gone by.

And it makes me think about my struggles to be a ‘proper’ Jew. Maybe I need to accept that there is no definitive recipe to make me become a 100% authentic Jew because I will always be who I am. Fifty percent of my DNA, not just physically but culturally, emotionally, psychologically, is shiksa not Jewess, but maybe that makes me think about every aspect of my Jewishness consciously because I take nothing for granted. I know I’m not as sweet as I should be, but maybe that’s not such a terrible thing after all.

My cakes had a deep dip perfect for houmus

Zelda Leon is half-Jewish by birth then did half a conversion course as an adult (half-measures in all things….) to affirm her Jewish status before a Rabbinical Board. She is a member of a Reform synagogue.

Zelda Leon is a pseudonym.