What does “lukier” mean in Polish?

Lukier is icing or glaze — in Polish baking usually just lemon juice beaten into icing sugar until it’s thick enough not to run off the cake. The verb is lukrować, “to ice,” and it has a second life: lukrować rzeczywistość means to sugar-coat reality, and lukrowany describes anything made to look sweeter than it is. So a Polish cook and a Polish critic use the same word.

The clip is practical Polish: sok z cytryny i cukier puder (“lemon juice and icing sugar”), za rzadki (“too thin”) versus dość gęsty (“thick enough”), and the reason for the thick coat — żeby ciasto nie wysychało, “so the cake doesn’t dry out.” The cake itself is a babka, the tall ring cake of Polish Easter, whose name literally means “grandma.” The word’s origin is a small kitchen joke in itself: the account given by Poland’s National Centre for Culture has lukier as a blend of likier (the liqueur cakes were soaked in), lakier (the “lacquer” look of the glaze) and cukier (sugar).