10-layer Russian Honey Cake from the 20th Century Cafe, one of the "12 Best Bakeries in San Francisco" (7x7). 20th Century Cafe is located at 198 Gough St. (the corner of Gough and Oak) in Hayes Valley.

Chow.com The Chow Blog

After I tasted the Russian honey cake at this little café in San Francisco last year, I tweeted “This is the best cake I have ever eaten.” Its creator, Michelle Polzine, is a pastry chef whose exquisite sense of vintage style is only slightly less remarkable than her baking skills. For a long time Polzine made the desserts at a restaurant called Range, where she applied exacting technique to the kinds of sweets you could love without having to pay homage to her exacting technique. You just sank into them. That’s what I love about the Russian honey cake at Polzine’s year-old 20th Century Café: It offers hedonism without complexity, even though the making of it is a rather complex undertaking. (Polzine calls the process, in which 10 to 12 cake layers are baked separately then built up into a honey-cream tower, “a little athletic.”)