Honey & Rooibos Loaf

An every day snacking cake

Hello! I feel like I’ve been going hard on the more complicated recipes recently, so today I’m coming at you with a nice, simple loaf cake. I’ve been trying to do more low-pressure baking this year, baking just for fun or for my own snacks rather than only making recipes to share here.

At the start of the week, I made Helen Goh’s ginger cake from Sweet (great book, I use it constantly), and it reminded me how much I love a simple, sticky loaf cake. After gobbling my way through the ginger cake faster than I’d like to admit, I decided it was time to make my own.

I didn’t want to make another ginger cake, Helen’s recipe is beautiful, and why mess with perfection? Besides, we’re moving out of ginger cake season here in the UK and into spring, so I wanted something a little lighter on the spices but still with an indulgent stickiness. Enter: honey & rooibos cake.

When you look at the ingredient list for this cake it feels like there’s a lot of flavours going on, we’ve got honey, brown butter, orange, cinnamon and rooibos tea but they’re all here to boost the honey flavour. Each of these flavours lifts the honey so that you can actually taste it. I added some rooibos mascarpone to some of my slices to make this cake a bit more of a “proper” dessert but this is totally optional, this cake is great eaten totally plain with a cup of tea!

Let’s get on with it…