Gergana Vasileva plus

The classical Russian honey cake has usually sour cream (with sugar or with honey) and walnuts (usally) as a frosting between the cake layers. In my case, I added also cutted figs from a very special jam. This is a typical Bulgarian jam from green figs. We prepare it at the end of spring, while the fruits are still green and hard. The recipe is quiet complicated.

I can buy a propper smetana here, at MixMarket, a store chain catering mostly to those that imigrated from the balkans and other eastern european locations. There is a bit of a problem with your description as "sour cream" for people not knowing smetana. Our sour cream is technically a pre-fermented milk product too, but what we translate straight from english, is really quite sour and got by far less fat than the french labeled Creme Fraiche, only 10%....a russian smetna is closer to a creme doublé than to anything else, got 42% fat and a very different taste and consistency. But I guess one could make a Philadephia-cake filling for the lighter alternative as regular lowfat creamcheese is just as mild and firm.

Some green figs in the jar they got too at Mix I guess, I am at least sure the turkish store just a bit further away got some... but so far never looked much into that. We usually buy our fig jam by french company bonne mamman sold at any big supermarket chain, mostly to eat on the baked camenbert or pancakes. It is very dark brown and I guess of ripe figs.
In Germany fresh figs are a shipped fruit from other contries where you can grow them comercially, usually sold by the piece or in pressure avoiding packaging like eggs, nothing to grow in the own garden or buy by the crate for jam making.

Well, the sour cream (what we call "smetana" in Bulgaria) is 20% fat. I think 10% fat is not enough and if you use only this cream, you may spoil the shape of the cake. On the other hand, 42% fat is TOO much (it's almost mascarpone)! Maybe, you can use 1 part of sour cream and 1/2 part of more thick cream (for example smetana - 42% fat). The cake layers are dry originally, but they get wet easily overnight, taking the "water" from the cream. So, the frosting cream must not be very thick. The walnuts are missing in the recipe above. I am spraying also 1 cup of ground walnuts over the frosting between the layers. It's tasty.

Concerning the fig jam, I chopped the figs and put randomly over the frosting between the cake layers.

BTW, another variety of this cake is known in Bulgaria as French rustic cake. There is a single difference - we use blueberry jam instead of fig jam. So, definitely, Martina, many people liked it sweet :))))