I thought I’d move slightly out of my comfort zone today, taste-wise that is. I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m not all that keen on cinnamon. I guess I don’t mind a little, but that goes a long way in my book. One of the things I really noticed, when moving to North America, was the number of cinnamon-flavoured items, and that the cinnamon-flavouring was usually very strong-too strong for me. Therefore I have shied away for ‘cinnamon’ in a cake. Time, maybe, to remedy that.
I was leafing through one of my old recipe books that I brought with me from the UK a few days ago. Now, I might have bought this book in the UK but it is actually Australian. It’s been very useful over the years for the tables of conversions in the back-cups to weights, Fahrenheit to Celsius, names of ingredients, etc. What I haven’t done is bake many of the recipes. Well, I came across a simple-looking cake, called Cinnamon Honey Cake- a single layer cake, topped with lemon buttercream. Now that sounded not too bad, especially as it specified only 1 tsp of cinnamon in the mix.
The Recipe:
| Cake |
| 50 g/¼ cup soft brown sugar |
| 4 tbsp/60 ml honey |
| 1 egg |
| 125 g/1 cup self-raising flour, sifted |
| 60 g butter, softened |
| 1 tsp cinnamon |
| 80 ml/⅓ cup milk |
Note that this makes one layer. For a two-layer cake, double the recipe or make it twice.
Preheat the oven to 350˚F /180˚C/Gas 4. Grease and line a 20 cm/8 in cake tin
Now the recipe suggests just putting all of the ingredients into a bowl and mixing it up, so I did.
I had helped the butter soften by trying a trick I’d found on line. I filled a jug with boiling water, left it for a minute or so then decanted the water and popped in my stick of butter, and it worked!
However, even with this trick it took forever for the butter to be incorporated into the batter. Maybe it would be better to cream the butter and sugar first.
The batter is quite sloppy. Transfer to the prepared tin, smooth the top and place in the oven for approximately 30 minutes.
I checked my cake after about 25 minutes and was glad I did because it looked done. A skewer inserted into the centre came out clean. It had risen, but not greatly so. The 8 in tin I used was a little larger than the 20 cm tin specified, so maybe that is why. This might work better as a single layer cake if baked in a 7 in tin.
Remove from the oven and leave to cool in the tin, on a wire rack, for 5-10 minutes, before turning out onto the rack to cool completely.
It looked a bit sorry, turned out, not really deep enough to be a single layer cake. What to do? Well, I’d make another one and turn this into a sandwich cake. This time I creamed together the butter and sugar first, before adding the other ingredients. It was quicker to prepare, but it made no difference to the colour, texture or the baking time of the layer, so it clearly could be mixed either way.
| Lemon Frosting |
| 50 g butter, softened |
| 310 g/ 2 cups icing sugar (powdered or confectioner’s sugar) |
| 20 ml/ 1 tbsp +1 tsp (or to taste) lemon juice |
| Splash of milk, as needed |
I had prepared the lemon frosting, intending this to be the topping of the single layer cake. I used the remainder of the stick of butter (about 50 g) and placed this in the bowl of my stand mixer. I beat the butter until fluffy then started to add the sugar, alternating with some of the lemon juice, until it was all incorporated. I actually added a dribble more lemon juice, as the mix was very thick and slightly granular. Because of this I also added a splash of milk, and this loosened up the buttercream enough to make a nice spreading consistency. Luckily, it was not too soft as it would now be serving as a filling, not a frosting.
Once cool, sandwich together the two cakes with the lemon buttercream. A dusting of icing sugar finishes off the cake.
The cake has a nice light crumb and a pleasant ‘stickiness’, caused by the honey. It does have quite a pronounced cinnamon taste, and warmth-well at least to my tastebuds; real cinnamon-lovers might find it a bit bland. I suppose it could be livened up by adding more cinnamon. It might also work rather nicely as a ginger honey cake; in fact, I think that might be a better combination for me. Still, I’m not turning my nose up at this one, and it makes a nice change from the more regular flavourings.
The Pudding Queen 