Floral Cake

Quite some time ago I ripped a recipe out of a Delicious magazine for a lavender poppyseed cake with an orange blossom honey syrup. It sounded amazing and very floral! In fact I couldn’t really imagine what it would taste like. But, it captured my imagination as I love syrup cakes, love poppyseeds and have a slight obsession with buying unusual ingredients and then not really using them (such as culinary lavender!!). I decided to make this cake for book club at my house last week, as now that I am a full time working, business owning mother as opposed to simply a full time working business owner, making a cake on a week night is a real achievement, let alone icing or decorating it! At least with a syrup cake there is no real need to ice it!
The cake was very easy to make – a simple cream the butter and sugar, add the eggs and dry ingredients cake. The lavender was meant to be rubbed into the sugar and then sifted out. Because I was using culinary lavender – ie already dried and ready to cook, I simply rubbed the lavender into the sugar and left it at that. The lavender flavour only ended up being a hint of lavender. I’m not sure if that was because the other flavours over powered the lavender or because it is a while since I bought the lavender and it may have lost its strength.

Once the cake was cooked and came out of the oven warmed orange blossom flavoured honey is poured over the cake. I didn’t have any orange blossom flavoured honey, so I added orange blossom water to taste to my honey and then poured it over the cake. The honey I used was a mild tawhiri honey. I am not a huge fan of honey so I prefer the more mild honeys. The cake had yummy flavours – it was probably a little dry around the edges and could have done with a bit more honey to make it more moist. I served it with whipped cream. An unusual cake, but one that I would make again.

Lavender and orange blossom honey cake (adapted from Delicious magazine)

1 tbsp culinary lavender seeds
125g sugar
250g butter
4 eggs
250g self raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp poppy seeds
1/3 c honey
1-2 tbsp orange blossom water to taste

• Cream butter, sugar and lavender
• Beat in eggs, one at a time then fold in flour, baking powder and poppyseeds
• Pour into lined 24cm springform tin and bake at 160c for 1 hour or until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean
• Cool cake, then warm together the honey and orange blossom water and pour over the cake