A spoonful of honey

Rather a long time ago, I bought a cute silicone cake tin for a tear-and-share cake, and never actually got around to using it. So when I was thinking about baking this weekend, I figured it was as good a time as any to try it out at long last. I'm using this recipe, because it sounds lovely and the photos look gorgeous! Fingers crossed for my version turning out so well!

Honey Pull Apart Cake

Ingredients

For the cake

• 250g Butter
• 375g Caster sugar
• 4 Eggs
• 1 tbsp Vanilla extract
• 160ml Milk
• 315g Plain flour
• 1tsp Baking powder
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 60g Ground almonds

For the glaze

• 60g Butter
• 60g Soft brown sugar
• 185ml honey
• 1tsp Vanilla extract
• 2tbsp Water

Method

1. In a stand mixer, cream the butter and sugar together until fluffy.
2. Beat in eggs, vanilla extract and milk.
3. Add the flour, baking powder and salt.
4. Mix in the ground almonds.
5. Pour into pan and bake at 180C for ~35-40 mins.
6. Heat all the ingredients for the glaze in a small saucepan, stirring to dissolve and simmer for 1-2 minutes.
7. Turn out the cooked cake and cover with the glaze.

Ready for the oven.

Straight from the oven - perhaps a little darker than I was aiming for, but not too far off. It's rather domed though; I think there might have been a bit too much baking powder perhaps.

I mostly got it out of the tin intact - I should probably have let it cool rather a lot more than I did before trying to turn it out. I did burn my fingertips quite a lot, and I suspect the cake would have been more resilient after a bit more cooling. The bake is a bit uneven - the edges are really nicely crisped up (nothing's burnt, the really dark bits are just lovely and crunchy), but the inner sections are possibly a little paler than I'd have liked.

Looks pretty good with the glaze too!

Well, overall it's a moderate success. It's not perfect, but it didn't turn out badly either. I think it's a pretty cute result. The cake itself is a little boring - somewhat bland, although the honey glaze helps. It's quite an eggy, sugary batter, which gives it a lovely crunchy texture if baked enough; I think it would have been better with a little longer in the oven, but I'm pretty sure that my nerves wouldn't have held, given how dark the top got. Perhaps I should have covered it partway through and let it bake a bit longer to try to get the top (by which I mean the bottom of the cake when it's in the tin) a bit more done. There's definite potential here, but it does need a bit of tweaking still.

The tin is a bit of a bugger to clean though!

Edit: It turns out, this is one of the rare cakes that's actually better cold than still warm. I found that I liked it more and more, the more I ate of it, and by the time it was mostly finished, I had actually come around entirely - this is actually really quite a good cake! The enormous amounts of butter in the glaze help keep it super moist, even if it is quite dense, so it keeps surprisingly well as well.

Quick and easy

I stumbled upon this recipe from Serious Eats earlier, and it looked intriguing - by which I really mean that it appealed to my lazy side. Active time 10 minutes, total time 25 minutes, and to be entirely done in a single bowl? Sounds good to me! This is roughly 3/4 proportions, but with a bit more flour than suggested in the original recipe, because sticking accurately to their amounts gave me a batter rather than a dough.

Quick dark brown sugar biscuits

Ingredients

• 150g Butter
• 210g Soft dark brown sugar
• 15g Caster sugar + 40g for coating
• 3g Salt
• 1 Egg
• 1tbsp Vanilla extract
• 250g Plain flour
• 1tsp Baking powder
• 1/2tsp Bicarbonate of soda

Method

1. Melt the butter.
2. Mix in the sugars and salt.
3. Stir in the egg and vanilla.
4. Stir in the flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda.
5. Divide dough into small golf-ball sized pieces.
6. Pour the sugar for coating into the now-empty bowl and roll the pieces of dough in it to coat.
7. Squash the dough balls to flatten slightly, and place on lined baking trays.
8. Bake at 180C for ~10mins.

Here they are ready for the oven. I know they're going to merge together - but I'm too lazy to spread them out over a third tray (after all, it's laziness that got me this far, so I might as well roll with it!).

Yup, they merged together. I don't care though - I think they actually form quite a pleasing geometric pattern like this. They look pretty good, don't they?

I added a little too much salt, so they came out ever so slightly salty - not awfully so though, and actually the slight saltiness adds a bit of interest. But the biscuits themselves are actually pretty good! In terms of tastiness-per-effort, these are definitely a big success!