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.