Deep, rich, and moist, this chocolate honey cake is naturally sweetened with honey and topped with a strawberry jam glaze. Supremely decadent, yet at the same time full of whole food ingredients, this cake is a beautiful treat.
With Valentine’s Day around the corner, I have had chocolate and strawberries on my mind. Also, my husband and I will celebrate our wedding anniversary tomorrow! So I wanted to make something special for us. Plus, I always like to bake something sweet for the kids for Valentine’s Day. This cake is the solution for all those things!
The recipe, like many recipes, is a combination of different sources. I adapted the cake recipe from an old favorite cookbook of mine, Mollie Katzen’s The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. (My husband and I went to her restaurant, the Moosewood Restaurant, when we lived in Ithaca, New York! Very delicious!). When I made the cake this time, I used Hershey’s special dark cocoa powder instead of classic cocoa powder, and it turned out great. For the glaze, I got inspiration from the blog dessert for two. The glaze is super-easy to make (just whisk strawberry jam, powdered sugar and milk together), and it adds so much flavor and is such a pretty pink color! We have some of my mom’s delicious homemade strawberry freezer jam in the refrigerator, so the glaze is packed with intense strawberry flavor that goes with the deep flavor of the chocolate beautifully. To be honest, it was hard to finish photographing this cake because I wanted to take a bite so badly!
In addition to our anniversary and Valentine’s Day coming up, it has been an intense week. We have all been working really hard. We all need chocolate from time to time (some of us need it more often than others 🙂 ), and we have earned this treat. Maybe chocolate cannot save the world, but it can definitely do a lot of good for the heart and soul! I hope you all have a great weekend, and stay warm! I will be joining the virtual potluck Fiesta Friday, co-hosted this week by Ai @ Ai Make It For You and Petra @ Food Eat Love.
Chocolate Honey Cake
for the cake:
Ingredients:
- 1/2 cup of unsalted butter (plus a little more for greasing the pan), at room tempterature
- 1 ounce (1 square) of bittersweet chocolate
- 3/4 cup of honey
- 2 large eggs
- 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
- 1/4 cup of unsweetened cocoa powder (I used Hershey’s special dark cocoa powder)
- 1 cup of unbleached white flour
- 1/2 teaspoon of sea salt
- 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder
for the glaze:
Ingredients:
- 2/3 cup of powdered sugar
- 2 heaping tablespoons of strawberry jam
- 4-6 tablespoons of milk (adjust depending on the consistency you want)
Directions:
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease an 8 x 8 inch square baking dish.
In a small saucepan, melt the butter and chocolate over low heat until just melted.
Pour the honey into a medium-sized mixing bowl. With an electric mixer or a hand mixer, beat the honey for about two minutes. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition. Then stir in the vanilla extract.
In another medium-sized mixing bowl, combine the flour, cocoa powder, salt, and baking powder. Stir well with a fork.
Beat the melted butter/chocolate mixture into the honey/egg mixture. Then fold in the dry ingredients, stirring with a wooden spoon to combine well. When everything is incorporated, spoon the batter into the prepared baking dish.
Bake in your 350 degree oven for about 30 to 35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack.
While the cake is baking, you can prepare the glaze. In a large bowl, combine the powdered sugar, strawberry jam, and milk. Whisk the ingredients together vigorously until a glaze forms. Adjust the consistency if you wish by adding more milk or powdered sugar. When you are ready to serve the cake, spoon or pour the desired amount of glaze over each piece of cake. Enjoy!
January is a time when good fruit can be hard to come by. But pears are perfect for this time of year. They are bountiful at the grocery store right now, and when baked, they deliver such a fresh, sweetness, especially when baked with cinnamon and brown sugar.
Sunny days are hard to come by in a Michigan January as well, and it looks like the sun has just come out here for awhile. We will take what we can get, and I will be getting outside here as soon as I can! We had a sunny day last Sunday, and were able to get out on the lake near our house before the weather warmed up just enough to thaw the ice. My husband and his friend ice fished while my daughter and I had a few minutes before sunset to walk down to the lake and say hello. It was so peaceful to be out on the ice at sunset.
Food can be a great comfort at all times of the year. In the middle of the winter, when it is often cold and gray outside, and dark in the mornings and evenings, warm food can definitely lift the spirits. This pear crisp puts a smile on my face, and my family loves it as well. And it is so very easy to make, which is an added bonus! Be well and stay warm! I will be sharing this recipe over at Angie’s weekly link party, 
I love all types of baked apple-cinnamon recipes, and this one is a bit different to me because the apple is stuffed with a filling inside of it instead of sliced and used as a filling. Because it’s a bit different, it makes a festive dessert or breakfast, especially served with some vanilla ice cream or drizzled with some maple syrup, or even caramel sauce. We had them for breakfast this morning straight up without any added toppings, and they were so good!
I added two new cookbooks to my collection over the holidays, and I adapted this recipe from one of them–Savor by Ilona Oppenheim. I love the photos in this cookbook, and the recipes are natural, beautiful, and seasonal. I made a few changes from the recipe in the book to fit the tastes of my family–but I am so grateful for the idea and the basic framework. This is a dessert/breakfast that is easy to make and comes together quite quickly, plus you can feel good about the wholesome ingredients.
The holiday season is over now, and it is time to get back to work, time for the kids to go back to school and indoor soccer, and hopefully time for me to put some positive new intentions and habits into practice in my little corner of the world. We spent a few days up in northern Michigan over the New Year, and it was so refreshing and invigorating to be up in that cold, clean air!
