Rosh HaShanah (the Jewish New Year) has many traditional foods, and this year I made a honey cake with my kids. I don’t have a family recipe for this, and I despise following a single recipe blindly. So I decided to develop my own recipe by looking at several options online, comparing them, and estimating what I would want mine to look like. I despise recipe blog bullshit, so here’s the recipe:

First, brew a cup of tea and let it cool down while you’re prepping the rest of the ingredients. Also, preheat the oven to 175°C while preparing the batter.

Mix the following in a large bowl:

• 2 large eggs (in Israel, large eggs are 63-73 grams)
• 190 grams of white sugar
• 30 grams of molasses
• 6 grams of vanilla paste
• 160 grams of honey

Mix using a hand mixer on medium/low speed until it foams up (the color will change from a dark liquid to a tan color). Then add the next batch of ingredients:

• 120 grams of tea
• juice from 2 oranges (I got 65 grams)
• 110 grams of canola oil
• 3 grams of salt
• pumpkin spice - ground nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon, cloves (use a tiny tiny amount), ground ginger, and white pepper

Give it a quick mix again, and add the flour:

• 300 grams of self-raising white flour

Pour the batter into two english cake molds (the single-use paper ones are maybe half the size of a loaf pan). After pouring the batter out, drizzle a few tablespoons of honey into the top of the batter (don’t mix it in). Bake it for 45 minutes at 165°C (it’s done when a skewer to the middle of the cake comes out with moist crumbs and not batter).

After the cake has cooled a bit, mix 20g of honey 1:1 with water and brush onto the top of the cake.

Alternatives

Brown sugar

Brown sugar is just white sugar with molasses added in. Because brands differ wildly (sometimes even between different batches), it’s difficult to say how much, but the total white sugar + brown sugar content should be 220 grams.

Self raising flour

Self raising flour is just generic white flour that has baking powder premixed into it. The ratio I use is 1 gram of baking powder for 50 grams of flour.

No orange juice

This is honestly optional. Just add some extra tea (50 grams) and sugar (15 grams) to make up for it.

Why no apples?!

The kids devoured the apples I had earlier in the weekend, so I skipped over it. I did see a few recipes that add apple chunks or applesauce so I might experiment with it next time. This might be a nice alternative for orange juice to make a non-citrusy variant.

No honey

It’s honey cake.

The process of developing this recipe

I wanted to take a more “engineering” approach to building this recipe. I started from some existing recipes, converted them all into grams, built my own based on my own guesses, and logged what I did end up adding in.

Inspiration

I started from these three recipes:

• allawysdelicious because it was the top Google result at the time
• krutit because my wife found a few recommendations for it
• Mirush, again because my wife found recommendations for it

Food science!

I converted each of these recipes into grams using the following densities:

• Honey is 1.43 g/mL. I used a different value at first because Google is showing incorrect answers above the result list. While writing this I corrected it. This change doesn’t make a huge impact on the recipe I developed. (sources: 1)
• Sugar is 0.95 g/mL. I used a different value at first for the same reason as above. This impacts the recipe a lot - I had intended to add around half a cup of sugar, but ended up adding a lot more than that. The kids liked the result, so I guess it’s a happy mistake. (sources: 1)
• Medium eggs are 53-63 grams. (sources: 1 2 3)
• Large eggs are 63-73 grams. (sources: 1 2 3)
• Flour is somewhere around 0.5, but can be compressed to around 0.8 g/mL. (sources: 1 2)
• Salt is 2.16 g/mL under ideal conditions, but probably closer to 1.4 for practical purposes. (sources: 1 2)

Building the recipe

Once I had the three recipes above in a Google Sheet in grams (along with a total mass), the general shape of these recipes becomes very obvious. At it’s core, this is a sweet quickbread similar to banana bread, but closer to “cake” territory than bread - especially based on the crumb size and shape.

Liquid ratios - water content

There are a ton of liquid ingredients in this recipe - eggs, tea, orange juice, oil, honey. Getting a balanced recipe means adding a lot of flour, meaning that it’s easier to make two cakes than to measure out a bunch of small stuff. Too much and it will turn out doughy or even crunchy.

Leavening agents

There are generally two ways of causing a batter to rise:

1. Pockets of air trapped by gluten - either created by yeast or steam created by captive water in the dough.
2. A foamy batter that was caused by neutralizing an acid and a base - the latter usually being supplied by baking soda or baking powder (which also contains a compound that becomes acidic when heated).

All of the reference recipes use both baking soda and baking powder. I don’t see a reason to use both unless your batter is overly acidic to the point it needs to neutralized prior to adding the primary leavening agent.

I follow a rule of thumb of 1 gram of baking powder for every 50 grams of flour.

Wishes for the future

I could totally see a baking companion app that has four modes:

1. Research mode: an embedded browser with a button at the bottom that adds it to a list of “references” and splits the screen to input the ingredient list for the current “project”
2. Development mode: Build up an ingredient list with suggestions based on the chosen reference recipes. Provide immediate feedback on similar recipes - classified into buckets such as “cake”, “cookie”, “quickbread”, etc. Also flag potential issues such as extreme batter pH, missing leavening agents, or forgetting salt.
3. Cook mode: Walks you through the recipe you just built - starting from collecting all the ingredients and suggesting alternatives if one is missing (e.g. milk + lemon juice if your buttermilk is expired). Then helping you remember the order of what goes in, how much of each ingredient, and offering a way to measure out exactly how much actually went in. Finally, making it easy to tag pictures to the exact recipe (both during the preparation phase and after baking).
4. Log mode: reviewing recipes attached to a project, and exporting them for easy consumption (maybe even auto-generating recipe blogspam).

I don’t think I’ll ever have the motivation to undertake actually building this, but I would enjoy it’s existence. If I really want to get back into mobile dev maybe I’ll work on a cut down version of this.