This is a Honey Cake made with only honey as the sweetener, no sugar, so you can really taste the honey (such cakes are rarer than you think!). You’ll love how it’s soaked with rich honey syrup, flooding the cake with extra honey flavour and making the crumb beautifully moist.
This sweet gem is brilliant as a pudding-like dessert to finish off a cosy dinner, or served for afternoon tea with friends.
Slice of honey cake with vanilla ice cream
Honey Cake
I had a load of home-harvested honey gifted to me by people in my life who keep their own bees. Thinking how best I could flatter such a lovely ingredient, I developed a slightly mad obsession with creating a cake that used honey and no sugar whatsoever. Sounds simple enough, right?
WRONG!
Turns out, it’s much harder than it seems. For one, sugar plays an important part in making cakes rise. When creamed with butter, sugar creates little air pockets as the cake bakes. When you remove sugar from the equation, cakes have a tendency to be very dense, as I discovered from various honey cake recipes I tried.
The other problem? Pretty much all the ones I tried don’t actually taste of honey. What’s the point then, I ask??! 😂
So I am chuffed to present my own honey cake recipe which I think does the cake justice both in name and the eating! It was broadly adapted from this Greek Honey Cake. If you do an ingredient comparison though, you’ll see that the end result bears little resemblance. The most distinct difference is the absence of sugar in my recipe.
Drizzling honey syrup onto honey cake
Overhead photo of Honey Cake
Ingredients in Honey Cake
Straightforward ingredients in this recipe! The key ingredient is of course, honey (imagine that! 😂).
Ingredients in Honey Cake
Honey – Not all honey is created equal! The better quality the honey, the stronger the honey flavour and the better the result. To be honest though, while I don’t want to encourage you to use dirt cheap mass-produced honey since it can sometimes be bulked out with sugar syrup, even if you use a regular mainstream brand the honey flavour will still absolutely come through in this cake.
Butter (at room temperature) – When recipes call for butter at room temperature or softened butter, the butter needs to be firmer than you probably think. Ideally it is 18°C / 64°F. This is soft enough to whip, but still cool enough that when you touch it, you don’t end up with a slick of grease on your finger.
Butter that is too soft can lead to greasy cakes that do not rise as well as they should. In fact, this is one of the most common problems in cake making!
Here’s a quick way to bring butter to room temperature: Cut fridge-cold butter into 1.5cm cubes (1/2″ thick slices if you have a US stick of butter). Scatter on a plate. Microwave 2 cups of cold tap water for 4 minutes on high in large mugs or a jug. Remove the warmed water, quickly put the butter plate in its place and close the door. DO NOT turn the microwave back on. The residual heat in the microwave air will soften the butter in 5 minutes.
Large eggs at room temperature – The eggs need to be at room temperature and not fridge-cold, to ensure they incorporate into the batter easily.
A quick way to warm up fridge-cold eggs: Place eggs in a large bowl, cover with warm tap water (just warm, not hot) and leave for 5 min. Wipe dry and use per recipe.
