Cake Slice Bakers - March 2013: Honey Bee Cake

Where did the month go? It seems like only yesterday was the beginning of March, and now it’s the 20^th! My goodness. Anyways, you know what the 20^th means, right? If you’re thinking cake, you’re absolutely right!

This month the Cake Slice Bakers chose to make the Honey Bee Cake found on page 36 of Vintage Cakes by Julie Richardson. I really encourage you to buy this book, or borrow it, or check it out from a library, either way get your hands on this book soon! I’m on my third year with this group and I have never been so pleased with a cookbook in my life! Every cake we have baked has turned out fantastic, including this one, despite my little missteps.

I mentioned last week how my weeks have been hectic and I haven’t had much time for baking. By the way, don’t worry about the lack of posts. I have a few recipes in the archives; I’m just trying to stretch them out so I can get some more goodies cracked out of the oven. So basically I had to crank this cake out soon because time was running out before I went on spring break.

I totally forgot how much butter this cake called for and I only had one stick in the fridge and the rest stored in the freezer, which I didn’t remember until I started getting all the ingredients out on the table. Well, I did was any other baker stressed for time does, I stuck a stick in the microwave and hit the defrost button. I was careful to stop every five to ten seconds to make sure my butter wasn’t melting, but I couldn’t stop it from becoming real gushy like. I was kind of worried about that, but I wasn’t going to waste that whole stick of butter, so I just hoped for the best. Then I reread the ingredient list and I needed an additional two tablespoons of butter, so I said screw it and left out the extra butter, since the half stick I saved was going to be for the honey brown sugar glaze.

Other than the little butter fiasco, everything turned out perfectly! The gushy butter wasn’t nearly as melted as I thought it was and the cake turned out beautifully! The glaze that goes on top created this soft and spongy texture. That little centimeter of gooey cake was definitely the best part of the cake I thought.

My roommate, P, doesn’t usually get excited about my baking adventures. She kind of just stares at me as I get excited about smells and textures. But with this cake she was totally into, even before it went into the oven. Then she went to go take a nap. When she woke up and came out of her room she kept asking when she was allowed to dig into the cake. To be completely honest, her excitement made me real happy.

By the way, I left the almonds out of this recipe because I’m not a real big fan of almonds, unless it’s in that Nature Valley sweet and salty almond granola bar, but that’s not relevant right now.  

Honey Bee Cake

Adapted from Vintage Cakes by Julie Richardson

Makes one 9-inch round cake

Ingredients

Cake

2 ¼ cups unbleached all-purpose flour

2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

1 ½ sticks (12 tbsp.) unsalted butter, room temperature

¾ cup sugar

1/3 cup honey

2 tsp. pure vanilla extract

2 eggs + 1 egg yolk, room temperature

¾ cup buttermilk, room temperature

Glaze

½ cup honey

¼ cup dark brown sugar

4 tbsp. unsalted butter

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Grease a 9-inch round cake pan with cooking spray. Line the bottom of the pan with parchment paper.

In a medium bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the butter, sugar, honey, and vanilla. Beat on low speed until blended. Increase the speed and beat for 5 to 7 minutes. Scrape the sides of the bowl as necessary. Beat in the eggs and egg yolk one at a time, adding the next one once the previous egg has disappeared. Decrease the mixer seed to low and add the flour in three parts, alternating with the buttermilk in two additions, starting and ending with the flour. Make sure to scrape down the sides of the bowl between each addition of flour.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Smooth the surface over with a rubber spatula. Rap the pan firmly on the counter a few times to release any air bubbles. Place the pan on the center rack and bake for 40 minutes or until the top starts to turn a light golden color.

While the cake is baking, make the glaze by placing the honey, brown sugar, and butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. Stir ingredients until melted and combined. Bring the mixture just barely to a simmer. Turn the heat off, but leave the pan on the burner to keep warm.

Remove the cake from the oven and poke holes all over the cake with a wooden skewer or toothpick. Pour the glaze over the cake and bake for an additional 5 minutes.

Cool the cake on a wire rack for about an hour before releasing from the pan. To remove the cake, turn the cake upside down onto a plate (not the serving plate), remove the parchment paper from the bottom, and flip the cake back over onto your serving plate. Serve warm.

This cake keeps for up to 5 days when wrapped up tightly and stored at room temperature.

Egg on Toast

Happy Monday! Well at least I hope it’s happy. A lot of people don’t like Mondays. I guess it’s because it’s the day right after the weekend and everyone is going back to work or school and real life starts all over.

I personally don’t mind Mondays; it’s Tuesdays I hate the most. Tuesdays are like the hangover to Mondays and that’s just not fun. Wednesdays get a little better because half the week has gone by, then Thursdays are super spectacular because the weekend is almost here, but not here, so you get t savor the weekend just a little bit more. Then Friday hits and it’s finally the weekend (although Fridays never feel like Fridays for me because I have a very long lab class that day that cuts into my lunch and then I’m left starving as I measure out 2g of Vitamin C, add it to some good old H₂O, watch the thing boil and hope it doesn’t turn too pink when I add just a smidge too much NaOH, but I digress)

So, here’s to all the people who just don’t like Mondays: a recipe so simple that you basically have to forget how the stove top works to mess it up.

My mom used to make this all the time when I was a little girl, this and hotdogs wrapped in pancakes with a side of ketchup (yes, it really was tasty and my sister and I often asked for it). For a while I stopped eating it, then over the summer I started craving it and made it for lunch at least once a week.

This is nothing new, some people know it as Toad in a Hole, but I know it as Egg on Toast. It is just bread with a hole cut out from the middle with scrambled egg inside. See, easy.

Drizzled with some maple syrup (don’t need to be fancy pancake syrup works just as well here) or honey (as I like to eat it now) this is simply the easiest thing to bake for breakfast or lunch, maybe even brunch.

Egg on Toast

Makes 1 serving

Ingredients

2 slices of your favorite bread

1 large egg, beaten

small pat of butter or cooking spray

maple syrup, pancake syrup, honey (optional)

Directions

Heat a skillet over medium – medium-high heat. Melt some butter on the skillet or grease it with cooking spray.

Cut a 2 – 2 ½ inch hole out of each slice of bread. Place one slice of bread (or two if your skillet is big enough) on the hot pan. Wait a minute for the bread to toast slightly. Pour in half of the beaten egg. Wait for a majority of the egg to cook (you’ll see it start to turn pale) and flip on the other side to cook. Repeat with the remaining bread slice and the remainder of the egg.

Drizzle with syrup or honey and serve warm. I also like the toast the little rounds I cut out. That way I get a little bit of toasty goodness and the bread doesn’t go to waste.  

Peanut Butter and Honey Crispie Treats

I can’t believe it’s already Fall! Autumn and Winter are my two favorite seasons. It’s something about the crunchy leaves, the crisp and cool air, and of course the awesome flavors and smells. I’ve noticed that any candle that pertains to Fall or Winter always have the best scents. I know that Autumn officially started on the 23^rd of September, but I have this rule for myself, well…more like a feeling really, Fall does not start when the calendar says it starts. To me, Fall begins the first day of October. September is that limbo month to me, it doesn’t know what season it’s supposed to be in, so it stands in a corner watching all of the other months play in the sprinklers or fallen leaves. I have the same feeling with Winter; Winter starts on December 1^st, not the 21^st or whatever.

Because of my quirky season rule, I refuse to make anything with pumpkin before the first of October, so while other bloggers are posting pumpkin cream cheese muffins, pumpkin bars and pumpkin who knows what else, I am giving you this little crispie bar treat.

These are not your typical rice crispie treats though. Instead of butter and marshmallows, I made them with peanut butter and honey. I really like that flavor combination. I remember in elementary school my mom would make me peanut butter and honey sandwiches because I didn’t like jelly. I don’t know what I was thinking because if I could only have one thing for the rest of my life, it would be PB&GJs. But back to peanut butter and honey crispie treats. The moment I took a bite out of this bar, I immediately tasted the honey. And I don’t mean in a cloyingly sweet kind of way, it was a subtle sweet. Then, the peanuttyness of the peanut butter slowly crept up. Again, it wasn’t an overpowering flavor, there was just enough peanut butter to satisfy my taste buds.

The entire thing takes just minutes to make and put into the pan. I do however, highly recommend keeping the bars, once cut, in the fridge, because as they sit out a room temperature, they start to fall apart, not that they don’t taste good that way either, it’s just something to point out if you want to have a bar and not a crumble.

Peanut Butter and Honey Crispie Treats

adampted from Ellie Krieger

Ingredients
¼ cup honey
¼ cup creamy (or chunky) peanut butter)
3 cups honey puff rice cereal

Directions

1. Grease a 9 inch by 9 inch square baking pan.
2. Over medium-low heat, heat up a medium-sized pot. Pour the honey and peanut butter in once the pot has warmed up. Stir the two ingredients together until the peanut butter has completely melted. Nest, add in the honey puffed rice cereal and stir until all of the cereal is coated in the honey and peanut butter mixture.
3. While still warm, dump the mixture into the greased pan, spreading all of the coated rice cereal bits out and into the corners. Make sure to press down hard for the cereal the compact together. Place in the fridge for at least 30 minutes for the cereal treats to harden. After 30 minutes, feel free to cut the crispie treat into your desired shapes and sizes. After cutting them, wrap the treats in plastic wrap and place in the fridge for at least another two hours, if you want a solid crispie treat. I found that after being in the fridge over night, the crispie treats didn’t fall apart as much the next day after sitting at room temperature for a while.

Honey Crepes for Breakfast

Yesterday I was really in the mood to make something with maple as the main flavor and when I typed in maple recipes into Google it gave me a recommendation for honey recipes, so I clicked on it, because honey is yummy too. And the first link was a honey website and where better to find honey recipes than a honey site, right? Well I looked all around the recipe categories and I made a mental note of a lot of recipes and then came the honey crepe recipe. I have only made crepes once before in my catering class, but that was with a crepe maker, and lets just say it wasn’t my shining moment. Well I decided to make it anyway because maybe it would be easier with a skillet. Let me just tell you if you are in the mood for crepes, just use your skillet, don’t go blow off $500 for a stupid crepe machine maker thing.


The first one I made was a disaster, I guess I had the temp too high (even though the directions said to do that) and there was smoke and it just wasn’t pretty, so I switched to a different pan and turned the head waaay down and started again. The next couple were decent and every now and then I would have a mishap, but after the 6th crepe I started to get much better, so better that there were hardly any gaps in the crepe, which I think is an accomplishment. These crepes are really good on their own or with some caramel sauce or chocolate or pretty much anything you can dream up. I had this one for breakfast:

I have a few crepe recipes stock piled onto my favorites bar, but I've been too scared to make them, but now I think I can, maybe today will be a crepe day and all I will have is crepes!

Honey Crepes
from Honey
makes 12 crepes (6 servings)

Ingredients
2 cups 2% milk
1 cup all purpose flour
2 egg whites
1 whole egg
1 tbsp honey
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1/8 tsp salt

Directions

1. Combine all ingredients into a blender or food processor until smooth
2. Spray and 8 inch skillet with cookies spray and heat over medium heat
3. Measure out 1/4 cup of the batter and pour into hot skillet, twisting and turning it until the batter covers the bottom of the skillet
4. Cook crepe for about 1 to 2 minutes and then gently turn the crepe over (Note: I killed my rubber spatula trying the do this, so start by pulling away the edges with a regular pancake spatula and then use your hands to flip it) Once flipped, cook for an additional 30 seconds to 1 minutes
5. Remove crepe to cool and repeat with the remaining batter. Crepes can be refrigerated for 3 days or frozen for 1 month

Nutrition Facts
serving size: 2 plain crepes
Calories 155.9 Total Fat 4.8 g Saturated Fat 1.4 g Polyunsaturated Fat 0.9 g Monounsaturated Fat 2.2 g Cholesterol 37.3 mg Sodium 63.5 mg Potassium 31.5 mg Total Carbohydrate 21.4 g Dietary Fiber 0.0 g Sugars 6.7 g Protein 7.4 g

Thanksgiving Honey Muffins

I found this recipe in a holiday Taste of Home edition and they seemed so good and I’m glad I bookmarked it because these things are fabulous! I have been making them for two Thanksgivings in a row and I was just reminded today how much I loved them You can taste just a hint of honey but it also seems to taste a little like cornbread (without the corn of course), which could mean one less thing going on and out of you’re oven next Thanksgiving. Also, these things a quick to make; prep time only takes about 10 minutes. Usually I take forever when baking things because I don't measure things in advance I just go with the flow and today I was shocked at how quickly these things took to prepare.

I ended up hading two today, even when I was stuffed with turkey and potatoes and whatnot, and I think I may have a third later on today ;). Seriously, make these; they are just that amazing!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I baked these early in the morning, that way the turkey

could have the oven for the rest of the day

a little toasty on the sides, but otherwise great!

and you can barely see the little flecks of honey that

didn't get incorperated all the way...mmm yum!

Honey Muffins

from the Taste of Home 

makes 12 muffins (I got 14)

Ingredients

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar

3 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg
1 cup 2% milk
1/4 cup butter, melted
1/4 cup honey

Directions

1. In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. In a small bowl, combine the egg, milk, butter and honey. Stir into dry ingredients just until moistened.
2. Fill greased or paper-lined muffin cups three-fourths full. Bake at 400° for 15-18 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Remove from pan to a wire rack. Serve warm.

Nutrition Facts
serving size: 1 muffin
Calories 143.0 Total Fat 3.9 g Saturated Fat 0.3 g Polyunsaturated Fat 0.0 g Monounsaturated Fat 0.1 g Cholesterol 25.2 mg Sodium 203.3 mg Potassium 27.4 mg Total Carbohydrate 25.5 g Dietary Fiber 0.6 g Sugars 12.9 g Protein 2.7 g