A honey cake with a long history and many layers

Honey cake, a springy loaf called lekach in Yiddish and traditionally served at Rosh Hashana, is not my favorite holiday dessert. So I was thrilled when, in the 1990s, Charles Fenyvesi, a colleague of mine at The Washington Post, shared a tantalizing family recipe for a Hungarian honey cake with thin, biscuit-like gingerbread layers.

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Essentially, it’s an icebox cake with a…