What do you do when you have near equal amounts of love for tea and for Russian honey cake? You Google to see if someone has tried mixing the two to make the ultimate cake, and lo and behold: you discover you’re not alone and that A Brown Table has in fact make an Earl Grey and Burnt Honey pound cake! Now, I had already decided to try his recipe to the T as I had can of beautifully fragrant French Earl Grey from TWG (I absolutely love the floral fragrance of bergamot), but as I was reaching for my loaf tin, I found this absolutely gorgeous Le Creuset bundette tray that I had never used and had actually forgotten about. It was shoved into the back of a cabinet, and that’s how I had forgotten about it. So, as tempting as Nik Sharma’s recipe sounded, I needed to make some essential adaptations for my soon to be Earl Grey and Burnt Honey Bundettes because baking is pure science and different shapes and sizes of bakeware require different chemistry.

First things first: if you’re baking a pound cake, it will have to be done lower and slower. So, the rest of the recipe would be the same, but for a pound cake you would have to bake it at 165 C for 30-40 minutes, as opposed to what I did for these bundettes: baking them at 175 C for just 15-20 minutes. The reasons for this are that 1. Bundettes a lot smaller so there isn’t a lot of central depth that that the heat needs to reach to, and 2. The ratio of surface area being directly exposed to heat is far higher (case in point: the hole in the middle). What would happen if you baked the bundettes low and slow? They would completely dry out. What would happen if you baked the pound cake at a higher temperature? It would be browner on the outside and raw on the inside.

The second and third things I did differently from the original recipe are that I used coconut oil instead of butter. I find that in baking, coconut oil is a very good 1:1 substitute for butter, and I also really love the smell and flavor of coconut oil. I’m keen to retry this recipe with butter and can only imagine for it to taste better, because as much as I love coconut oil, it’s very overpowering and took the limelight away from the Earl Grey and burnt honey a tiny bit.

And lastly, I topped my Earl Grey and burnt honey bundettes with macerated berries and a tangy Greek yogurt glaze.

Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients:

• 70 grams coconut oil + extra to line the bundette tray with . You can also use softened and cubed unsalted butter instead too.

• 1 1/2 cups cake flour (which you can substitute with all all purpose flour too but it’ll make for slightly less soft bundettes or cake.  If you want cake flour but don’t have it, you can just use 1 1/2 cups of AP flour bur remove 2 tablespoons of the AP flour and ass 2 tablespoons of cornflour)

• 1 1/4 Tsp baking powder

• 3 to 4 Tbsp Earl Grey tea leaves or any other fragrant black tea leaves of choice. Lapsung Suchong would be nice too. I used TWG French Earl Grey as I love the fragrance of bergamot.

• 1/2 cup + 1/4 cup runny honey (to be used separately in different steps). Make sure you use clear, runny honey, not the cloudy kind or any that might have bits of honeycomb.

• 1/8 tsp baking soda

• 3 large eggs

• 1/2 cup [120 ml] full-fat unsweetened Greek yogurt

• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract (vanilla bean paste would be ideal. Vanilla is entirely optional here though because the tea and honey are so fragrant

• 1/4 tsp fine sea salt

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 175 C
2. Grind the tea leaves to a fine powder (you can do this with a mortar and pestle)
3. Mix all your dry ingredients except the baking soda in a bowl and set aside (flour, baking powder, salt, tea and flour)
4. In a saucepan on medium heat, heat 1/2 cup honey until it reached 110 C or bubbles start to form. You can use a candy thermometer or an infrared thermometer. I used a steak thermometer and it worked just fine. At this point quickly lower the heat/flame and mix in the baking soda.
5. The honey will start to froth. Keep stirring until the temperature reached 130-132 C or the colour changes to a dark amber. At this point, switch the flame off, and transfer this frothy honey into a large mixing bowl.
6. Mix in the remaining 1/4 cup of honey.
7. Once the temperature of this honey mixture reached 65 degrees or lower, whisk in the eggs one at a time.
8. Whisk in the coconut oil (or softened and cubed butter depending on what you’re using)
9. Whisk in the greek yogurt and (and the optional vanilla, I skipped the vanilla), and the dry mixture until everything is well-combined but do not over-mix and overwork this batter because when we are making cake we don’t want to knead and increase gluten formation as we do when we make bread
10. Line the bundette tray with butter or coconut using a brush, making sure to properly grease every nook and crevice in order to ensure the cakes come out easily
11. Pour batter into the molds until 3/4 full using a batter bowl that has a spout, or a piping bag. You want to make sure you don’t wait too long to do this, because the oil/butter/grease that you used to line the molds might settle to the bottom.
12. Bake uncovered for 20 minutes.
13. Let the cakes cool inside the tray, and simply flip over to release.

For the glaze: Mix 1/2 cup greek yogurt of choice (I used Driscoll’s berries) with 2 tablespoons lemon or lime juice and 1 tablespoon of honey. This can be served alongside the cakes for an optional drizzle.

For the macerated berries: Take 2 cups of mixed berries and toss them in 2 tablespoons of icing sugar. Let this sit for 30 minutes in the fridge, and it will help the berries naturally release some of their juices while still maintaining their shapes. Serve alongside the cakes as an optional topping as well.