Rosh Hashanah starts this evening and we need a honeycake–it’s traditional, plus I like it. Right. But traditional recipes call for boiling the honey with strong coffee (which takes a while), cooling it (which takes even longer), triple-sifting flour and baking soda and sugar and spices of various kinds, and then alternating between adding dry stuff and the honey-coffee mixture to some beaten eggs and oil. This is much more of a pain than it sounds in so few words. Picture wax paper and bowls all over the counter and the kitchen table, and a huge stack of stuff to clean afterward. All for one or two loaves of what’s essentially a rich gingerbread.
One year I got smart–I think it was the year I bought both Silver Palate cookbooks and found their gingerbread recipe, which is incredibly simple and calls for molasses–surely it would work with honey? And it does.
Then I took things a step farther–having made a bunch of box-mix cakes in the era when Duncan Hines started recommending applesauce instead of oil for a lower-calorie cake, I knew that worked pretty well, and it does here too.
Then I really got weird and microwaved the cake–you can, and it works, but my daughter and her friend are doing it this afternoon as a project (I’m tarping the entire dining table and floor) so this year I’m sticking with tradition. Even though the temperatures are back up in the low 90s. Continue reading
Filed under: cooking, Desserts | Tagged: baking, cakes, gingerbread, honeycake, recipes, Rosh Hashanah, Silver Palate | Comments Off on Honeycake for a Sweet New Year
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