Spiced Honey Cake Recipe
Words, recipe and images by Yasmin Shenhav
Yasmin Shenhav of Sunny Side Up, shares with us her recipe for Spiced Honey Cake. This is something she makes every year to celebrate the tradition of Jewish New Year.
The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, has many food-related traditions.
We celebrate the beginning of the new year by eating a variety of foods that symbolise sweetness, kindness and abundance.
Some of them include eating a fish head, which symbolises our wish to be “heads” and not “tails”, while eating a pomegranate expresses our wish for a year filled with merits – as many as the pomegranate’s seeds. Perhaps the most famous tradition associated with the holiday is eating an apple dipped in honey so we will have a good and sweet year.
So for this recipe, I wanted to adopt the new year tradition and use honey as the key ingredient, however to make it slightly different and unique I’ve replaced some of it with Silan, which is a date honey syrup and peeled sliced apples to enrich it.
As you will see in the recipe, the cake has a few spices in it, but if you don’t have one or all of them, don’t worry, it’s still going to be delicious!
Spiced Honey Cake
By Yasmin Shenhav
Makes 2 x 1 pound cakes pans
(Dimensions: 31cm l x 10.5cm w x 5cm h)
Ingredients
4 eggs
1 cup of sugar
1 cup of neutral oil
0.5 cup of runny mild flavoured honey
0.5 cup of Date honey syrup – Silan (or honey)
2.5 cups of plain flour
1 tsp of baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp dry ginger powder
1 tsp of cinnamon
Pinch of cardamom powder
1 cup of very strong hot black tea or coffee (1 spoon of instant coffee stirred with 1 cup of boiled water).
1 medium sized apple, peeled and thinly sliced (a sour green apple like Granny Smith is preferable)
Sliced blanched almonds, handful
Method
Heat the oven to 160° and prepare two x one pound cake pans by lining them with parchment/baking paper
Beat eggs and sugar for a total of five minutes or until the mixture becomes thick, fluffy and doubles in volume
Very slowly add in the oil, while constantly whisking
Add the honey and the Silan to the mixture
Sift all the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, baking powder, ginger, cinnamon and cardamom) and add them to the egg mixture
Now pour one third of the tea or coffee into the mixture while whisking until it blends through, then followed by the next third, and once blended, add the final third (this has to be done in parts so that the temperature of the hot coffee or tea is gradual and prevents the eggs in the mixture from cooking/scrambling)
Immediately pour the mixture two thirds of the way into each of the pans (do not go higher than this)
Place the apple slices on top of the mixture and sprinkle the top with the almonds
Bake for 35 to 40 minutes in the preheated oven or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out with only a few crumbs
Spiced honey cake gets better after a day or two, stored in a box outside the fridge, (up to a week).
Have a sweet one and a Happy New Year – Shana Tova!
ALSO BY YASMIN SHENHAV – TEL AVIV TRAVEL GUIDE BY A LOCAL & CHREMSLACH PANCAKES
