I am not Irish. I am not Mexican. I am not Jewish. Yet what I am is a food lover. I love exploring what different cultures make to celebrate different times of year. Rosh Hashanah is the celebration of the Jewish New Year. The date changes each year since the Jewish calendar is a lunar one. Rosh Hashannah can be as early as September 5th or as late as October 5th. One of the common things served for this event is honey cake. A cake with a strong honey flavor sounds amazing to me. So I did a little research and found two recipes that I could use to turn out this treat the bees would be proud of.
For this cake I used two different types of honey. First I opted for buckwheat honey (courtesy of the Mohawk Valley Honey Company) for the batter. Buckwheat honey has a rich, molasses like flavor that plays really well in baked goods. Second, I used Mohawk Valley Trading Company Maine Wild Blueberry & Summer Wildflower Honey. I thought the fruity and floral notes of this honey would pair nicely with the punch the Buckwheat gives the cake itself. The batter I used I got from the blog, Good Food Matters (I couldn’t agree more!). The butter cream frosting recipe I discovered at the site, Romancing the Bee, which is written by an urban beekeeper.
What I really like about this cake recipe is that the butter is browned. That brings an additional dimension of flavor to the cake.
- 1 cup butter, browned
- 1 cup buckwheat honey
- 2½ cups All Purpose Flour
- 2 teaspoons Baking Powder
- ½ teaspoons Baking Soda
- ½ teaspoon kosher salt
- 1 cup whole milk
- 1 tablespoon vanilla
- 3 eggs
- 1 cup butter, at room temperature
- ⅓ cup plus 1 tablespoon floral or fruity tasting honey
- 4-5 cups powdered sugar
- milk (for thinning if necessary)
- Start by browning 1 cup of butter. Choose a non-stick frying pan and melt the butter over medium heat. Make sure it’s melting evenly, heat the butter until it has started to turn brown. Set aside.
- Combine flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda in a mixing bowl. Set aside.
- Pour browned butter into bowl of your stand mixer.
- Mix in the buckwheat honey.
- Mix in the milk
- Mix in the flour mixture.
- Add the eggs, one at a time.
- Pour batter into two 9 inch cake pans. You can use one, but I did two to make it easy to put butter cream in between the two cakes later without having to cut the cake in half.
- Bake at 350 degrees until a toothpick comes out clean. 15 to 20 minutes.
- Let cool before frosting
- Cream the honey and butter together for about 2 minutes.
- Then beat in the powdered sugar. Add milk if frosting is too thick, add more powdered sugar if too thin.
- Spread about half of the butter cream on top of one cake.
- Then add the other on top and spread frosting on that
This cake came out so incredible moist and full of flavor. I loved the buckwheat honey in the cake. And the butter cream was out of this world. A great reason to ring the New Year, no matter whose calendar you follow. Speaking of calendar I need to mark this date on a calendar, I found a cake that was in the same league as a chocolate one, not an easy task for my taste buds!
Floral Source: Star Thistle plants
