Honey Cake and High Holiday Menu Ideas

September 27, 2011 Rivka

Yep, it's that time of year again. The High Holidays are upon us! For those celebrating, it's a time to cook up a storm, get those pomegranates on the table, slice up the apples, and of course, pull out the stops with an awesome brisket. For the rest of y'all, it's a chance to read all you ever wanted to know - and more - about honey cake. Here, then, are my menu ideas for this time of year. They're great for Rosh Hashana, but they're also pretty delicious for any old day.

First things first: I teased my Twitter followers with the promise of an awesome honey cake in the pipeline. Now, I deliver. I made the Gourmet Live honey cake this week, and let me tell you, it is the best honey cake ever. I have to save the cake for a meal later this week, so I haven't yet glazed it (hence the stolen photo from Gourmet and none of my own, yet), but i made a miniature to taste test, and it passes muster and then some. It's an interesting take on a honey spice cake, made with plenty of honey, ginger, cloves, orange zest... and coffee. You won't be able to put your finger on any one flavor in the cake, but its beguiling flavor will keep you coming back for another bite, then another. Gourmet says your guests will ask you for the recipe; I'll let you know if my hosts ask me.

Honey Cakebarely adapted from Gourmet Live
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons cinnamon 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger 1/4 teaspoon ground clove 3 large eggs 1 cup sugar 1 1/4 cups corn or canola oil 1 cup pure honey 3/4 cup lukewarm coffee 1 1/2 teaspoons packed grated orange zest, optional
For chocolate glaze: 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons shaken canned unsweetened coconut milk (not light) 2 teaspoons light corn syrup 4 ounces bittersweet (60% cacao) chocolate, finely chopped
For garnish: Flaky sea salt, such as Maldon (optional)
Heat oven to 350°F with rack in middle. Generously spray pan, including center tube, with baking spray, or wipe with olive oil and sprinkle with flour, shaking out excess.
Whisk together flour, baking powder and soda, salt, and spices in a large bowl.
Whisk eggs well in another large bowl and whisk in sugar, oil, honey, coffee, and zest (if using) until well combined.
Make a well in the center of the flour mixture and add the honey mixture, then stir with the whisk until the batter is smooth.
Pour batter into pan (it’s liquid enough to level itself in the pan), and bake in oven until springy to the touch and a cake tester comes out clean, 45 to 50 minutes.
Let cake cool in the pan on a rack for 20 minutes. Loosen cake from the pan with a thin rubber spatula, then invert cake onto the rack (see Cooks’ Notes) and cool completely.
For glaze:
Bring coconut milk and corn syrup to a simmer in a small heavy pan, stirring until combined.
Remove pan from heat and add chocolate. Let chocolate stand 1 minute, then stir until chocolate is melted and glaze is smooth.
Let glaze stand, stirring occasionally, until thickened slightly, but still pourable.
Transfer cake to a cake plate and slowly pour the chocolate glaze over the top of the cake, letting it drip down the sides. If desired, let the cake stand at room temperature until glaze is set. Just before serving, sprinkle glaze lightly with flaky sea salt, if using.

Pomegranate Brisket

I first posted my brisket recipe on another blog post about Rosh Hashana menus. It really is the best brisket ever - plus, it's made with pomegranate syrup, and pomegranates are a traditional Rosh Hashana food. You can't go wrong with this recipe.

Sweet and Sour Pearl Onions

A great side dish to accompany the brisket, requiring minimal enough work that you'll have enough time to bake those challot. Speaking of which...

Couscous with Pistachios, Sultanas, and Mint

The perfect summer-to-fall transition dish, and one of my all-time favorite ways to use couscous. This recipe is a winner, and it can be served warm, cold, or at room temperature - perfect for those unpredictable meal times.

Carrot-Zucchini Bread

For those who love their sweet side dishes, this carrot-zucchini bread will hit the mark. For the Brits and others who think we Americans with our marshmallow-buried sweet potatoes are crazytown, this is a great dessert.

Braised Red Cabbage

An oldie but goodie, this dish always gets loads of compliments when I serve it. It also features pomegranate seeds; apparently I can't get enough.

If you're looking for other menu ideas, look no further.

To all of my readers, new and old - I hope you all have a wonderful New Year, filled with happiness and health, and lots of new, exciting things.

Enjoy! Oh, and do share your menu ideas in the comments: what are you making this holiday season?

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Blue Chair Fruit's Black Raspberry Jam

One Saturday night a few weeks ago, friends tipped us off that Butler's Orchard had snap peas and blueberries and black raspberries all ready to go at once. Needless to say, we canceled all other plans for the next day, and by 8:30 am Sunday morning, we were off to the races.

Blueberries are awesome to pick with an 18-month old. They free from the bush easily, they're plentiful at toddler height, and us oldies can reach the higher ones and save our backs while the kid gets the low-hanging fruit. We came home with 5 pounds of blueberries, 5 pounds of black raspberries, and stains just about everywhere.

Thai Grapefruit Salad

If you've seen me in the past few weeks and expressed even vague interest in Asian food and/or cooking, I've probably bored you to tears gushing on about the best cookbook of the year (IMHO), 101 Easy Asian Recipes. The title is both accurate and a bit tongue-in-cheek, since it makes the book sound like something fusion-y and inauthentic and terrible, when in fact, it inauthentic, and unabashedly so, and wonderful. The back of the book has big speech bubbles boasting "100% inauthentic" and "very good" and "easy, really." It's fab.

The book comes from Peter Meehan, who has worked with David Chang (Momofuku) and Danny Bowein (Mission Chinese) for years, co-authored the Momofuku cookbook, and now edits Lucky Peach magazine. He's clearly a meticulous guy who gets how Asian food works -- the balance of flavors, the precision with cooking times, etc. But this book takes a step away from the "this has 500 ingredients/steps, but it's worth it"-style of recipes, opting instead for formulas that follow two important ground rules: no deep-frying, and no recipes within recipes. The rationale: Asian food isn't just for Sunday projects, it's for weeknight dinner with kids. Good bless you, Peter Meehan.

Mango Sticky Rice

've had this Thai glutinous rice sitting in the bottom of my cupboard for months, but never quite worked up the guts to make it into something until, a few weeks ago, the waiter at our little Laotian spot in the neighborhood told me that sticky rice may be the easiest thing on their menu to make at home. That doesn't necessarily say much, considering the menu includes items like crispy rice salad (involving rice that's cooked, mixed with other stuff, formed into balls, deep-fried, broken into pieces, and tossed with a gazillion other ingredients, which I know only because I've made it and whoa, pain in the butt doesn't even start). Still: "easier" was motivation enough not to let that rice sit untouched.

Winter 2016: Odds and Ends

Not a full post today, but a bunch of odds and ends that I've been meaning to share.

Marmalading: That's what kept me out of trouble and away from insanity during our two-ish weeks of hibernation under an impenetrable and, apparently, unplowable 30 inches of snow. (Attention DC officials: occasionally, it snows here. Surprise! Buy another plow or two.) Fortunately, my fridge was chock-full of citrus you've never heard us, because Cathy went to Texas for a marathon series of cooking classes, and her trip coincided with Central Market's wonderful Citrus Festival, and she is a goddess and a wonderful friend and a crazy lover of citrus like yours truly. (I paid her in Barcelonian anchovies, yes). For most of last weekend, our home smelled like a heavenly mix of chartreuse hot cocoa (thank you Pam!) and boiling citrus peel. Not shabby. Not shabby at all.

Povitica: The Best Babka Ever

It's snowing! It's snowing! THE APOCALYPSE IS COMING! I hope you bought flour and sugar. I hope you happen to have walnuts in the house. Yes? Wonderful.

Meet my latest, love, the Povitica. It comes from my other latest love, the Great British Baking Show. If I may, for just a moment, evangelize on its (the show's) behalf, it is the sweetest, coziest little food show on television. Contestants do their preparation in advance, and come to weekly competition with dog-eared copies of recipes they’ve developed. If someone runs behind, others pitch in to help out. Even the hosts of the show sometimes provide assistance. There’s a lot of smiling and hugging, absolutely no product placement, and so much Englishness, you won’t know what to do with yourself. It's Victorian sponge for miles.

Don't let the coziness fool you: each episode brings a "bake" more ambitious than the last. There are hot-water pastries and raised yeasted loaves, tiered pies and sculptured cakes. There are desserts you’ve never heard of, from Germany and Poland and France and Croatia, which if you saw in a cookbook might give you pause: lots of ingredients, pages of instruction, no sense of what the thing is supposed to look like if baked correctly. But when a bunch of (okay, very accomplished) home bakers give these recipes a go, under the pressure of a short timeline a televised competition, you watch them, and you think, yeah, maybe I could do that. One minute I’m watching the show, then next, I’m all I must have this in my oven now. That is why last week I up and baked a dobos torte, just because. And then this week, I got baking shpilkes again, so I went totally mad and baked my beloved povitica.

Persimmon Walnut Bread

This is a happy-accident story, but it doesn't start that way. This past fall, I was determined to make hachiya persimmons into smooth, spiced butter. But each time I tried, I created something so ruined, so mouth-dryingly inedible, that I had to dump the entire thing. I did this too many times. cough three.

Fuyu persimmons are sweet and crunchy. They can be eaten as you would an apple. Hachiya persimmons are not as friendly. If you buy them hard, you must wait to eat them, or you will take a bite and your entire mouth will turn dry and chalky, like what tannins in wine do to your mouth but unpleasant, a thousand times unpleasant. To avoid this, you must tend to your hachiyas: put them in a paper bag, set them somewhere warm but not too warm, encourage them to ripen but protect them dutifully against spoilage. Hachiyas can be eaten when they are soft all over, and plump like a balloon. At that point, their astringency goes away, leaving behind soft, floral-flavored flesh that's wonderful as is, or in dozens of baked goods.

The catch, though, is that if even one bit of the persimmon hasn't reached that perfect stage of ripeness, its astringency will infiltrate and ruin whatever you're making with it. This is especially true in the case of butter, where the persimmons are cooked together and then pureed. And so it was for me, time after time, I found persimmons, coddled them to ripeness, cooked them, blended them, tasted them, cursed, and tossed the mixture into the trash. So wasteful, so frustrating. There must be a better way.

Sprout Chaat Salad + New Site!

I want desperately to tell you all about this chaat-style salad I've been making almost daily, but it's probably rude to offer guests something to eat without first saying hi, so:

Hi! I've got a new home.

Not Derby Pie is still there - go see for yourself - but it was time for a fresh start. I never really had the technical wherewithal to manage my own website. I faked it pretty well for 8 (!) years, but with every automatic Wordpress update, my site would break a little bit more – the header, gone! the comments, gone! etc – and late last year, I finally decided I needed a full reboot. So, here we are: From now on, I'll be sharing new recipes over here, at rivkafriedman.net.

I used Squarespace to build this site, and I hope you love its clean interface as much as I do. The search function is simpler, the design is 100% mobile-friendly, and I've managed to haul all of my old posts over to this new home, with only minor glitches in spacing and captions and whatnot. I'm 90% of the way there. The biggest issue is that ingredient lists in recipes transfer as a block, not a list. You may see some other minor formatting issues for a little while longer. If a recipe looks particularly garbled, you can always find it back on NDP.

New year, new start. I'm so excited to finally share this with you.

Now then, onto business. 2016's first sprouts are ready for a salad.

Maple Walnut Squares

I know it's almost Christmas, but I'm about one month behind (on everything) and right now, I need to commit a tiny act of Thanksgiving blasphemy. I tell you this: the best dessert I ate on Thanksgiving was not pie.

By 7 pm the evening of the holiday, our house was full of neighbors who had decided to stay local. Our table was overflowing with pies, many of which our friends had brought: a glistening, lattice-topped sour cherry pie; several bourbon/brandy-filled pumpkin pies; a gorgeous rendition of Deb's chocolate tart with gingersnap crust (a slice of which I carefully set aside for myself, which my unsuspecting and always-cleaning lady accidentally threw away, *sob*) and many more. I tried too many; I loved them all. But I think my favorite bite of all was a slice of these maple walnut squares.

How to Give Thanks

Croissants (really, I made croissants) + other croissant-ish things

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Sprout Chaat Salad + New Site!

I want desperately to tell you all about this chaat-style salad I've been making almost daily, but it's probably rude to offer guests something to eat without first saying hi, so:

Hi! I've got a new home.

New year, new start. I'm so excited to finally share this with you.

Now then, onto business. 2016's first sprouts are ready for a salad.

Fennel frond pesto + what to do with those pesky stalks

Asparagus Toasts with Pistachios and Mint

Eggplant-Walnut Pâté + Passover Ideas

Best Mushroom Pizza (or any white pie, really)

Lentils and Rice with Tamarind Sauce and Dukkah

Big Kale Salad with Pomegranate and Feta

Punchy Crunchy Ginger Salad

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Povitica: The Best Babka Ever

It's snowing! It's snowing! THE APOCALYPSE IS COMING! I hope you bought flour and sugar. I hope you happen to have walnuts in the house. Yes? Wonderful.