Bumble Honey Cake from the Bakehouse

Buckwheat honey makes for a very special holiday cake

One of the highlights of the Rosh Hashanah season has just hit the Bakeshop’s shelves. Bumble Honey Cake is back! And I’m happy to say, it tastes terrific! Complex, sweet, with a bit of bitterness in the background, substantive but not too heavy, delicious any way you eat it. It is, quite simply, to my taste, one of the most terrific sweets we make!

In our never-ending work to make more flavorful and more traditional food, a few years ago, we began using freshly milled rye flour from our friends at Janie’s Mill in Ashkum, Illinois. What was already really good before we found their flour, almost overnight, became so terrific that I had a hard time not eating it all day! It’s so much more flavorful than the honey cake I grew up with. Kudos to the Bakehouse crew for making it happen.

Honey cake at the Bakehouse is made from a long list of luscious ingredients, including a healthy helping of buckwheat honey from a beekeeper in northern Michigan. The honey’s got a big, bold, dark, mysteriously fruity flavor. Add in the freshly milled rye flour, sugar, eggs, golden raisins, fresh orange and lemon zest, ground cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, and some freshly brewed black tea, and you’ll send the New Year off to a good start.

Honey cake is not, of course, limited to Jewish bakers. It’s typical of the entire region of Eastern Europe—a couple hundred years ago, honey cakes were what one could make using locally available ingredients, enhanced with small bits of whatever spices (once incredibly costly) the baker could afford. What we make at the Bakehouse is, at its most basic level, also very similar to what other bakers of the region prepare as well. Ukrainian poet Ksenia Rychtycka wrote a poem about making honey cake with her mother, called “Why Honey Matters.”

The poem, in Rychtycka’s most recent book, A Sky Full of Wings, was written when, while making honey cake in her kitchen about 18 months after her mother had passed away, she suddenly sensed her mother’s presence. It’s a beautiful and touching example of the importance that traditional foods can play in our lives. While we each have a particular food, or foods, that call up our loved ones, the feeling, I believe, is nearly universal. Rychtycka writes,

It was an emotional moment as my mother loved my honey cake and was always so happy when I would bake traditional Ukrainian dishes. At the same time, it was comforting to sense her presence and made me very happy.

…

The sense of history and tradition that is passed down through generations. Bonds that endure even in extreme circumstances. The cycle of life and death and how we remain connected to our family members through memories, and the legacies that are, in turn, passed on to future generations. Also, how using a specific image or item in a poem can take you down so many different paths. The poem started as a memory of an emotional moment in the present and the deeper I got into writing it, the more it delved into the past.

The Bumble Honey Cake from the Bakehouse is delicious after dinner. It’s also a terrific way to start the day. Its big, well-rounded, softly spicy flavor would be fantastic with a cup of that great Tree Town Blend coffee we’re brewing this month. The honey cake is terrific with Creamery gelato as well. You can toast it and serve it with a little Creamery Cream Cheese in the morning. Or with some room temperature Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter.

If you have friends or relatives to whom you want to send sweet New Year’s wishes, the crew at Mail Order is standing by to ship some for you soon! Send some honey cake to Aunt Harriet up in Harbor Springs. The Bumble Honey Cake is already available from Mail Order, and you can also buy it starting this coming Friday, 9/19, at the Bakeshop and the Deli. Bring it as a gift, or buy some for yourself, in which case you can have your honey cake and eat it too!

Find the recipe in our cookbook