Spiced Honey Cake

Hi everyone!

So on Monday evening, me and the girlfriend went to the latest gathering of Birmingham's Clandestine Cake Club.  I'm not sure what I'm allowed to tell you.  As you can guess from the name, it's a bit like Fight Club... except instead of fighting, everyone just eats cake.  Check out the website - www.clandestinecakeclub.co.uk

The theme this time was "Trick or Treat", and this was my offering...

It's a spiced honey cake, and if I do say so myself, it was pretty delish.  I made a couple of changes to the recipe in the book (really old book from the 80's).  Firstly, it's covered in royal icing and I drew a witch on it in that decorating icing that comes in tubes, but that was just for show.  The cake underneath is the good bit!

The recipe was for one massive cake, but I scaled it down and split it into two sandwich tins so it would bake faster (I was running really short on time).  It also meant I could add my own touch to it, and added a sort of orange/honey glaze in the middle of the sandwich.  Here's the recipe if you want to give it a go yourself.  The book for this one is so old that I reckon I'll be able to post it!  Besides, I've made changes to it!  It's possibly the easiest cake I've ever made. Literally throw everything in a bowl, then bake it.

Bear in mind that this recipe made too much batter for our two 7" cake tins, and it climbed out of the tin and made a mess of the oven.  You could probably get away with doing half of this!  The book asks for

"a greased 30x25cm (12x10 inch) cake pan"

I didn't have one of those, and I wanted a round cake to make the moon, so sandwich tins it was.  I'd definitely recommend lining them with baking paper!  If you're doing a single big cake rather than a sandwich, add the zest to the batter before baking and ignore the "sandwich" instructions.

- 500g honey (plus a few spoons extra for glazing)

- 250ml sunflower oil

- 2 tsp instant coffee

- 150ml boiling water

- 225g dark brown sugar

- 4 eggs, beaten

- 500g self raising flour

- 1 heaped tsp ground cinnamon

- 2 tsp ground mixed spice

- 1 tsp ground ginger

- 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

- Zest of 1 medium orange

- Mix the honey with the oil.

- Dissolve the coffee in the water and add to the honey mixture

- Add the sugar and eggs, and mix until the big lumps of sugar have gone

- Mix the flour, soda and spices in a bowl, then sift into the honey mixture.  Stir in well.  Add the orange zest at this stage if you're doing a big cake rather than a sandwich. It should look a bit like a carrot cake batter at this stage.

- Pour into the greased cake tins, bake at 160 degrees (325 F, gas 3) for 30-40 minutes (ish?? just keep baking it until it stops wobbling, and when you stick a knife in it comes out clean)

- Leave for a couple of minutes after removing from the oven, then turn out onto a wire rack, upside down so that you're left with the bottoms facing up.

- Once cooled, cover the exposed bottoms of both cakes with a glaze of honey, and scatter the orange zest onto the glaze on one of the cakes.

- Turn the honeyed sides together to make your sandwich cake.  The honey soaks into the cakes a little bit, making the sandwich a bit gooey in the middle!

Done!

Hope you like my addition of the honey glaze and orange zest (my version also has slightly more mixed spice, yummy).  It seemed to go down well at CCC anyway!

Now I'm going to go and knock back my bread.  Bye for now!

Bob x