Backstory:

My grand aunt Aliammachy was known to be a very good cook. She passed away when I was quite young, but her recipes live on in our family and I love how food brings back memories of your loved ones – those still here and have passed on. So this one is pretty precious to me, and is also extremely delicious and simple. I hope you enjoy it | Instagram: @satshyaa

You need:

• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup honey
• 3/4 cup salted butter (room temp)
• 1 tbsp water
• 1 cup maida
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp vanilla essence

How to:

1. Preheat your oven to 180c
2. Heat butter, honey, sugar and water in a deep-bottomed vessel and keep stirring over low heat until the butter melts. Do this slowly because honey can get denatured at high temperatures so the idea is to melt the butter and sugar, and lightly caramelise the mix.
3. Once the mixture cools down, add your eggs in one by one and whisk it until fluffy (make sure it’s cool otherwise you’ll get scrambled eggs lol)
4. In another bowl sieve in maida and baking soda, and then add the flour mix to the batter little by little
5. Add vanilla essence, give it one whisk until everything is well-combined and fluffy
6. Pour into a cake tin lined with parchment paper and bake for 30 minutes (check at the 20 minute mark just in case)
7. After 30 minutes, take it out and poke a toothpick – if it comes out clean then it means it has been cooked. If it’s sticky, bake it for 10 more minutes, while keeping a close eye to make sure it doesn’t get burnt (it’s honey brown cake not black cake heheheeh)
8. While the cake is still hot, drizzle honey over the top – make sure you cover the entire top!
9. You can poke holes over the top and then drizzle it if you want, but my cake already had nice aerated bubbles from the baking soda so i didn’t need to do that
10. Let it cool down (the honey then caramelises over the top as it does) and cut a large slice and enjoy!

Tips:

1. You can try caramelising your butter-sugar-honey mix a bit to get that lovely bitter caramel edge by stirring over the low flame until the mixture starts to simmer and turns a tad darker than the golden brown
2. Let your cake cool down fully before flipping it out of the tin to cut it. I flipped it out when it was still warm and the top of my cake got stuck to the plate and I lost that lovely caramel glaze
3. Use a good quality honey for the top drizzle and you can use a regular honey for the baking process.