Floral Honey Cake

When this month's alphabake challenge was announced as the letter 'H' I had a quick think about which ingredients would fit. Hmm, more difficult than it sounded this month. I think we were eased in relatively easily with L, M and B. H is more tricky. I turned to my baking books and had a look in the indexes, which confirmed that there is actually very little under H. Two ingredients popped up time and again. Hazelnuts and Honey. I subsequently had a harder think and came up with a number of other H's; hummingbird, herbs, horlicks (?!) and then a hedgehog slice.

But actually I love honey so I decided to keep it simple and go for one of the obvious options (hazelnuts having been ruled out by allergy). I love the diversity of honey - the different colours, textures and flavours and just think it's such a wonderful natural product. What bees do for our life is utterly amazing and I wouldn't like to imagine life without them. (Wasps on the other hand ... begone nasty wasps)

I nearly bought heather honey to make this a double H entry, but then saw this beautiful Leatherwood honey. I've had this before and as the jar describes, it's strong and floral in scent, and I knew it would come through beautifully in a cake.

I kept the other ingredients simple to allow the flavour of the honey to shine through and sing. I used light muscovado sugar because this is such a beautiful caramelly complement to the honey.

Floral Honey Cake
Ingredients

60g butter

40g light muscovado sugar

40g honey (mine was tasmanian leatherwood honey)

1 large egg

80g self raising flour

Method

- Preheat the oven to Gas 4/180C. Grease and line a 6"/15cm round tin. I was using a loose based tin so did the whole base and side lining thing to try and avoid cake mix getting in the tin seams which makes it a pain to clean.

- Cream the butter, sugar and honey until light and fluffy.

- Add the egg and flour and continue to beat until all well combined and light.

- Scrape into the prepared tin and spread around/level off a bit.

- Place in the oven and bake for 30 minutes until springy to the touch and/or a cake tester inserted comes out clean.

- Allow to cool a little then remove from the tin and allow to cool completely on a wire rack.

This is such a lovely little cake, as I knew it would be, having made it before! It is moist and delicious and the honey flavour is utterly amazing. The added bonus of making this cake is that the whole time it is baking, the house smells of molten honey, which must be one of the most delicious scents known to man (well, to me!) during baking.

This cake is my entry into the alphabakes challenge this month, with the letter H. Alphabakes is hosted by Ros of The More than Occasional Baker and Caroline of Caroline Makes. The host this month is Caroline.

I am also entering this into Teatime Treats. The theme this month, alternately hosted by this month's host Karen of Lavender and Lovage and Kate of What Kate Baked is Floral or Flowers. I think my honey cake with honey from leatherwood flowers will qualify - after all if there were no flowers we would have very little honey!