Muraveinik

Muraveinik is a homemade cake shaped like an irregular little mound of piled-up pieces of baked pastry. Its name means “anthill” in Russian. Dough baked thin and flat is broken into pieces, bound with a rich condensed-milk cream and heaped up. When the cake is sliced, instead of neat layers, the cut surface shows large and small pieces clustered together.

Piling up the pieces

A crumbly butter dough is baked and, once cool, broken into pieces. Another method is to chill the dough and coarsely grate it, or pass it through a meat grinder, before baking. When the baked dough is coarsely crushed, fine crumbs fill the gaps between the large pieces and, together with the cream, hold the mound together.

One example of the cream combines cooked-down sweetened condensed milk with butter. The rich cream binds the pieces, and heaping the mixture into a mound on a plate and chilling it helps it hold its shape. If the pieces are piled without being pressed together too firmly, spaces remain between them. As the cake rests, the pastry and cream meld, combining a crisp bite on the outside with moistness inside. Some households mix in walnuts or raisins or scatter poppy seeds over the surface.

Instead of baking the pastry by hand, some recipes use store-bought biscuits or cereal. The pieces are bound with cream and assembled into a mound. Even without a mold or elaborate decoration, it becomes a cake to be sliced and served.

Some mounds show the pieces on the outside, while others have a smoothly covered surface. The finish changes the visual impression, even with the same anthill shape.

A form passed down at home

A home baking book published in 1993 gives a method in which a stiff dough made with smetana is chilled, coarsely grated and spread on a baking sheet. In this example, the dough is baked, cooled and broken up, then combined with a cream of cooked sweetened condensed milk and butter, along with walnuts, and heaped into a mound.

One family’s recipe collection tells of a woman from Vladivostok who added this cake to her household recipe book after receiving it at a friend’s birthday. In that household’s method, chilled dough is grated and baked, walnuts and raisins are mixed into the crushed pieces, and the mixture is formed into a mound with a cream of condensed milk and butter. It is one example of a taste first encountered as a celebratory gift coming to be made again and again in another household.

A resource introducing the cuisine of Karelia includes, under the same name, a method in which meringue cookies are dipped in coffee-flavored buttercream and piled into a mound. In another example, crushed baked dough is bound with a cream containing condensed milk. Even within the same “anthill” shape, there is more than one choice of base confection and binding.

In Ukrainian, it is also called murashnyk, which likewise means “anthill.” The cake spread through households in the Soviet era, and each family’s formulation and style of decoration have been handed down. One such decoration is scattering poppy seeds over the anthill-like mound to look like little ants. One theory links its origin to an American fried confection, but a similar shape alone cannot establish how the cake came about.

Another confection made by piling small pieces of dough into a mound is the Tatar chak-chak. Its distinguishing feature is that short pieces of dough are fried in oil and bound with honey syrup. It differs from muraveinik, which binds pieces of baked pastry with cream, in both how it is cooked and what binds it.

Kartoshka, which likewise makes use of pieces of baked goods, is a confection shaped into small potato forms. Muraveinik, by contrast, is a cake in which the pieces are left intact and heaped into a large mound, then sliced.

Glossary