Tips for Better Honey Cakes:

Honey cakes often have a tendency to fail, leaving us with the question of why, and more importantly, how can we prevent it? The “why” is sugar, and the “how” is all about respecting the sugar!

The sugar content in a honey cake is exceptionally high, thanks to both the white or brown sugar and the addition of honey. Sugar heats up in the oven much faster than the other ingredients, leading to various complications. Here are my top eight tips for achieving better honey cakes nearly every time:

1. Precisely Weigh Your Ingredients: If you haven’t yet adopted the practice of weighing your baking ingredients, stay tuned – there will likely be a future rant on this topic. For now, at the very least, make sure to measure your ingredients carefully.
2. Bake at 160°C/325°F: Resist the temptation to raise the heat any higher!
3. Work Fast: Once the wet and dry ingredients meet in the bowl, it should only take a few minutes before your cake is in the oven.
4. Avoid Doubling the Recipe: If you need to make more cakes then one batches worth, prepare each batch individually. The cake mixture must be placed in the oven immediately.
5. Don’t Overfill the Cake Pan: Overfilling can result in cakes leaking all over your oven at best, and at worst, they might explode! if you have extra cake mixture, make muffins or a smaller cake.
6. Do NOT Open the Oven Door Prematurely: Do not open the oven door before the minimum recommended baking time for the cake. This means not using the oven for anything else while your honey cake is baking; doing so can cause the cake to sink in the middle.
7. Prevent Overbaking: Remove the cake from the oven when a few crumbs stick to a knife inserted in the middle.
8. Embrace Imperfections: Your cake may still slightly sinking in the middle (mine always do), but it will still be delicious. Like life itself, love your honey cake because of its imperfections, not in spite of them.

Honey Cake: A History
Honey is the world’s earliest known sweetener.

Pure honey, in its natural form, never spoils, because of this in many cultures, honey symbolizes truth and immortality.

Have you ever heard of the drink called ‘mead’? It’s one of the earliest alcoholic beverages, likely created accidentally when wild yeast settled into a container of diluted honey – and hurrah!

When the Bible mentions the ‘Land of milk and honey,’ it actually refers to date honey.

Yet, by Talmudic times, the Hebrew word ‘devash’ came to mean bee honey.

The earliest cakes known to humankind were likely honey cakes, made from crushed legumes and honey.

In the tenth century, Italians began experimenting with honey and breadcrumbs, baking them together on the oven floor to create dense cakes. During the Middle Ages, Jews acted as intermediaries, transmitting food and cooking techniques between Christian and Arab worlds, bringing these rudimentary cakes to Central and Western Europe from Italy.

The Machzor Vitry, a Jewish prayer book from the late 11th century compiled by Simcha ben Samuel of Vitry, France (d. 1105), mentions ‘challot of fine flour with honey.’ Honey cake is again documented in a Jewish source around 1200 and in a non-Jewish source in 1320. In medieval Europe, honey cakes (referred to as gingerbread in English due to the spices used) were the cake of choice for all festivities.

The honey cake we enjoy today has evolved over centuries. Our modern cakes would be unrecognizable to Simcha of Vitry in the 11th century. In the seventeenth century, European bakers began updating medieval recipes, including honey cake. They introduced eggs, oil, replaced breadcrumbs with fine flour, and incorporated sugar alongside honey. In the mid-19th century, the addition of baking soda and then baking powder resulted in even lighter cakes. These cakes could no longer be baked free-form on the oven floor and required tins.

While honey cakes eventually lost their popularity in Europe, Jews have been serving them for a recorded 1000 years especially on Rosh Hashanah. The fact that our community continues to make honey cakes year in and year out not only connects us to our past but also helps us remember how we got here. I love our active commitment to passing down this tradition to future generations.

History adapted from Gil Marks ‘Encyclopaedia of Jewish Food’