Is your honey cake soggy and sagging? Or dry and chewy? For a seemingly simple bake, it’s a surprisingly difficult to get right. Every year someone emails or calls to ask me the secret to getting this Ashkenazi Rosh Hashanah staple right.
Here are my five top tips for lovely lekach:
- Precision is king:
Make sure you use accurate scales to weigh your ingredients and do not mix imperial and metric measures. This cake cannot cope with a mix and match approach. Also make sure your tin is the right size. Too small and you will be scraping honey cake off the oven shelf until at least Yom Kippur. Too large and your cake will be more pancake than palatial.
- Keep things fresh:
Check your bicarbonate of soda is in date. It does go off, and will lose its oomph. With no raising power, your cake will never stand a chance of even reaching the height of the tin, let alone above it.
- Give it time:
An under-baked cake is very often the reason for a saggy middle. Whatever you do, do not open the oven before the baking time has elapsed or at least ¾ of that time.
- Honey may not be your friend:
I know the bees have put in overtime to bring you this sweet treat, but honey is rumoured to be the cause of many a failed cake. I did the research here and found that an enzyme in it can turn flour watery, meaning it will take longer for the cake to cook. At one point Rowse introduced special low-enzyme honey, but if you can’t find that, you may want to switch to a golden syrup-based recipe. I know it’s not the same, but it will still taste — and look — great.
- Be like Bolt:
Time is of the essence with a bicarbonate of soda-raised cake. It starts working as soon as it mixes with the acid — which may be orange juice or coffee in your recipe. So make sure that oven is hot and the tin lined before you kick off. Then, as soon as you get the wet and dry ingredients into the same bowl rush them into the tin and then the oven. Give it every chance you can.
For the record, my favourite honey cake remains this one. It's soft, sweet and won't leave you gagging for a glass of water.
Good luck with whichever honey cake you attempt this year.
May they all be light, well risen but moist and as sweet as the new year to come.
