Gingerbread bear
Fly to Bern
In Bern, gingerbread often carries a bear. Not a bear moulded into the dough, but one drawn on top in white sugar, line after line: standing, sitting, with its family or in its pit. It is this drawing that sets Bern’s Lebkuchen apart from the rest.
The cake itself is dark and fragrant. The dough combines honey, milk, flour and a blend of spices that each bakery keeps to itself: coriander, aniseed, star anise, cloves, ginger or nutmeg, in proportions that mean no two taste alike. It is left to rise for four days, rolled out to six millimetres, cut into rectangles, rounds or hearts, then baked until dry. Out of the oven, a veil of potato starch gives it its shine.
Then comes the decoration. Confectioners apply it by hand, with a paper bag rolled into a cone: a bear, an edelweiss, a dove. The habit is younger than you might think. Honey and spice cake is old, but it only appears in Bernese cookbooks from the 1800s, and sugar decoration only spread once beet sugar became cheap. In 1946, a baking manual already described it as a point of pride for the city’s confectioners.
As for the bear, Bern has kept living ones since the 15th century, beside the Aare, in memory, so the legend goes, of the bear its founder is said to have caught.
Sources: Wikipedia, “Berner Honiglebkuchen” (English) and “Fosse aux ours de Berne”; Pastry Arts Magazine, “Berner Lebkuchen: The Original Gingerbread”.
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