As it's a long weekend, I felt a nice cake or two would help it go more smoothly! First up is a lavender and honey cake. I looked a lots of lavender cake recipes but most were paired with Earl Grey tea, since bergamot and lavender sit so nicely together. I looked a honey cakes too, but few included lavender. I've had a jar of borage honey on the go for a while, which I love because it doesn't taste of honey (which I hate normally), and there are lots of salad recipes online that use borage and lavender flowers so I thought I'd find a honey cake with lots of honey in it, use borage honey and add some lavender. My original filling idea was lavender buttercream but I now realise that will make it taste like a scented candle. I'm now thinking about a tea buttercream or injecting melted honey into the cake once cool. I'm going to top with purple fondant icing as I've offered some to R and his ladyfriend as part of our friendfood fun, and if one is gifting cake, one should make it as pretty as possible - it's a good excuse to. Could use a tea buttercream, I guess...hmmm...
Lavender and Honey Loaf Cake
(this makes a 2-lb loaf tin but a round tin would work too I guess)
150g butter (cubed)
100g borage honey
75g white sugar
3 eggs
250g self-raising flour
3 tbsp dried lavender flowers
Pre-heat the oven to 180C (160C for fan ovens) and leave the butter at room temperature to soften slightly. Cream the butter, sugar and honey until light and fluffy and then beat in the lavender flowers. Add the eggs along with about 1/4 of the flour, beat thoroughly and then add the rest of the flour. Put it into a loaf tin and bake for 60 minutes or so.
Earl Grey Buttercream
60g unsalted butter
1 cup icing sugar
2 Earl Grey teabags (use decent ones)
Put the teabags into boiling water - about 100mL thereof - and leave for 20 minutes - giving the bags a squeeze every now and again helps. Cream the butter and sugar and add about 4tbsp of the tea until you get a pipe-able consistency. I added a few drops of red and of blue food colouring to make it less brown and more purple and then piped it into the cake.
I decorated the rest of the cake using fondant icing that I made from pre-mix icing sugar for fondant icing. I added purple gel colouring and after applying it, sprayed it with silver shimmer spray to make it opalescent.
