Tag Archives: Honey

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Make a Honey Spice Cake for a Sweet New Year and Fall

depotpumpkin

Honey is one of the world’s oldest foods. Ancient Egyptian tomb reliefs from as far back as the 3rd millennium B.C. show bees being smoked from their hives to produce it. Nomads and traders helped honey’s popularity spread worldwide, while it remained a prevalent sweetener in the Middle East, where it still often, and wonderfully, appears in Mediterranean, Arab and Jewish dishes.

Jews around the world traditionally celebrate their new year (which this year begins at sundown tonight) by dipping apples in honey, and by eating honey and spice cakes, the better to usher in a “sweet new year.”

And lots of people ring in Fall by making honeyed cakes of wonderful harvest ingredients like pumpkin, and warm spices like cinnamon, cardamom, and cloves.

This terrific and tasty honeyed spice cake recipe is from the San Francisco Chronicle. The resulting cake is at once dense, moist, and extremely flavorful.

Of course, you don’t need a new year or season to make this cake. Its firmness and ease of slicing makes it a natural for school lunches and after-school treats. It’s loaded with healthy ingredients and happens to taste especially good.

Photo by Susan Sachs Lipman:
Pumpkin spice cake at the Mill Valley Book Depot


Make this Honey Spice Cake for a Sweet New Year and Fall

depotpumpkin

Honey is one of the world’s oldest foods. Ancient Egyptian tomb reliefs from as far back as the 3rd millennium B.C. show bees being smoked from their hives to produce it. Nomads and traders helped honey’s popularity spread worldwide, while it remained a prevalent sweetener in the Middle East, where it still often, and wonderfully, appears in Mediterranean, Arab and Jewish dishes.

Jews around the world traditionally celebrate their new year by dipping apples in honey, and by eating honey and spice cakes, the better to usher in a “sweet new year.”

And lots of people ring in the fall by making honeyed cakes of wonderful harvest ingredients like pumpkin, and warm spices like cinnamon, cardamom, and cloves.

This terrific and tasty honeyed spice cake recipe recently appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, just in time for our good friend and fabulous cook Sandy Waks to try it out for a Jewish New Year gathering last week. It was very meaningful to slow down and gather around her table, which brimmed with fresh, often biblical, foods — Sandy’s also a fantastic gardener — and warm, interesting company, and to stop and give thanks and blessings for the new year.

Of course, a year, or even a season, needn’t be starting to make this cake. I intend to make it many times this fall. Dense cakes like this one pack well for school lunches and other times, are loaded with healthy ingredients, and just taste yummy.

Photo by Susan Sachs Lipman: Pumpkin spice cake at the Mill Valley Book Depot

Local, Sustainable Tastes of the Sonoma-Marin Fair

Sonoma and Marin Counties enjoy such a rich agricultural bounty that it should come as no surprise that the Sonoma-Marin Fair provides a wonderful opportunity to sample some of the best and newest local, sustainable food. This year, the Farm-to-Table exhibit had been expanded. The first item we tried was the fantastic McEvoy Ranch Olive Oil. You could really taste the fresh grass in it.

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McClelland’s Dairy (where we used to take our daughter to watch the cows being milked) is now making their own organic, artisan, small-batch butter, which we happily sampled and found extremely tasty.

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We had terrific honey from Hector’s Honey, which is available at the Santa Rosa, CA, and other local farmer’s markets in eucalyptus, vetch, wildflower, and other flavors from local flowers.

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We spoke with Karen Bianchi-Morada, 8th generation cheesemaker (Italy, Switzerland, and now five generations in West Marin). Her Valley Ford Cheese Estero Gold was extremely tasty. Aged 120 days, it’s an asiago-type cheese that’s buttery, distinctly flavored, and affordably priced. It’s available in Whole Foods and other local markets.

faircheese

Next up was something new called Sonomic Vinegar, from Wine Country Vinegars. It’s a rich balsamic-like vinegar that had more depth and flavor than a typical balsamic and, yet, was still made from 100% grapes. The producer also runs Sonoma Valley Portworks. I assured him a visit would be forthcoming.

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Of course, no fair would be complete without the requisite corn dogs, funnel cakes, garlic-fry bricks, deep-fried twinkies (!), watery margaritas, barbecued chicken, chow mein, kettle corn, and lemonade. And, sure enough, we left the sustainable exhibit and sampled some of that stuff, too.

Follow our other fair adventures here.

Photos by Susan Sachs Lipman

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