Honey-Nut Oat Clusters, and a Review of Clarks Honey

Honey-Nut Oat Clusters

Earlier this month I was sent a selection of Maple Syrups and Honeys to review from Clarks. I have already reviewed the Maple Syrups along with my recipe for Superfood Pancakes here. Clarks have also branched out into a great range of honeys, you can buy them here from Amazon. I was sent a Clear Blossom Honey, as well as Acacia and Lavender varieties. The recipe below uses the Clear Blossom, however you could use any flavour honey in the recipe, to achieve different tastes and flavours to suit.

Of the samples sent out to me from Clarks, my favourite has to be the Acacia, which is a milder tasting honey by its nature, and is great for adding to beverages as a replacement for sugar, or using to sweeten dishes. If however you are making something where you want the honey flavour to be one of the key tones, using a blossom honey will give a more distinctive taste.

A selection of the Maple Syrups and Honeys available from Clarks

I have developed this recipe for Honey-Nut Clusters as I recently won an Easi-Yo yoghurt maker after entering my Plum and Almond Crumble into the Credit Crunch Munch challenge. I have been experimenting with homemade yoghurt ever since, but both Gary and I agreed that we needed to find something with a bit of 'crunch' to top it off. This is a great basic recipe, and could easily be adapted by adding various dried fruits, nuts or even some chocolate chips to achieve different flavours and textures.

Ingredients

300 grams Rolled Oats
50 grams Golden Caster Sugar
1/4 teaspoon Salt
1/2 teaspoon Cinnamon
100 grams Mixed Chopped Nuts
150 grams Blossom Honey
1 teaspoon Vanilla Bean Paste

Method

Combine the oats, sugar, salt, cinnamon and mixed nuts in a large mixing bowl, stir well. 

Add the honey and vanilla bean paste to a smaller bowl, and mix together. Blossom honey can crystalise, and if yours has, place the bowl in the microwave for 15 seconds to thin the mixture back down again. 

Pour the honey and vanilla mixture into the dry ingredients. 

Mix well so that the honey is evenly distributed throughout the dry ingredients.

Transfer the mixture onto a lined baking sheet, spread evenly, and press down with the back of a spatula or wooden spoon to compress the mixture. 

Bake at 180 degrees for 15 - 20 minutes until golden brown, take care not to let the edges go too dark or they will taste bitter. Once golden, remove from the oven and set aside to cool completely.  

Finally, once cool, break into clusters. Stored in an airtight container, these will keep up to 2 weeks. Sprinkle over fresh yoghurt, and add an extra glug of honey for a tasty breakfast. 

Honey Cream Cake and the First Ever Chesterfield Clandestine Cake Club

Last Monday evening heralded the first ever meeting of the Chesterfield division of the Clandestine Cake Club. For those of you not yet familiar with the growing sensation that is the Clandestine Cake Club, here is a little potted history. Founded by Lynn Hill in Leeds in 2010, the CCC is a gathering of like-minded cake folk. Lynn's vision was to create a club that would allow people to get together over Tea and Cake and socialise. All the attendees bake and bring a cake, usually against a set theme for the meeting, and spend a few hours chatting and sampling the cakes on offer. The clandestine part comes from the fact that the location of each meeting changes, and is not disclosed to the group until just before the event. 

Fast forward two years, and many of the bloggers that I follow and love are members of their local CCC. I have greedily read their blog posts about their fantastic bakes, and seen the photos of tables groaning under the weight of the most glorious selection of cakes. So imagine my excitement when browsing the CCC website and I saw that Fiona had only gone and set up a Chesterfield division! I emailed her immediately and signed up. 

We met on Monday night, and the event was held at Harleys Hairdressers on Chatsworth Road. I'd never been to Harleys before, but want to just take a second to describe this gorgeous little salon. Harleys is a Hair and Beauty Salon, but with a stunning boutique gift shop attached (Harleys Interiors), and a cosy little waiting area with plush couches and chairs. The unprepossessing exterior of Harleys barely hints at the stylish, yet homey atmosphere inside, and I can easily imagine losing a day in here, being pampered, getting my hair done, and browsing the shop. It made a great venue for the CCC as well, as the cakes were displayed around the salon on the hair stations, so we could easily meander through and assess enjoy each cake on its own little podium!

'Spring has Sprung' Honey Cream Cake

Anyways, back to my cake. The theme for our first meeting was 'Spring has Sprung' (haha as I type this there are 3 inches of snow on the ground outside). Fiona had advised me that there were already several Lemon based creations on the list, so I wanted to provide a different flavour. With March not really heralding a great selection of seasonal produce that could form the basis of a cake, my thought process took me to emerging buds, and flowers coming back to life after winter, and I pictured bumble bees starting to gather pollen again to make honey...so Honey Cake it was! Made with leftovers and things that I had to hand in the pantry, this recipe is one of my own creation. I have since discovered it is very similar in make up to a Russian Medovnik Honey Cake, although the Medovik cake generally has 10 much thinner layers to its make up than the four here in my cake. 

Ingredients

For the Honey Cake

225 grams butter

450 grams golden caster sugar

4 eggs

350 grams plain flour

1/2 teaspoon bicarb of soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

200 grams honey flavour greek yoghurt

80 grams honey

For the Honey Cream filling

1 x 395 gram tin of condensed milk

3 eggs

2 tablespoons honey

60 grams unsalted butter

For the 'Spring has Sprung' decoration

500 grams unsalted butter

500 grams icing sugar

Food colour gels in orange, yellow, and green

A selection of sugarpaste blossoms

Method

To make the cake - pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees, and lightly grease two 9 inch cake tins. In a large mixing bowl, beat together the butter and caster sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating in well. 

Put the yoghurt and honey in a jug and stir together. In a separate bowl, sift the flour, and add the bicarb and the salt. 

Now gradually add the flour and yoghurt mixtures a bit at a time, alternating between the wet and the dry, and fold into the egg mixture. Stir well to make sure that all the ingredients are well combined. 

Spoon the mixture evenly into the two prepared tins, and bake for 35-40 minutes, or until it passes the skewer test. Remove the cakes from the tins, and place on a cooling rack. 

To make the honey cream filling - Put the condensed milk, eggs, butter and honey in a heavy bottomed saucepan. Heat over a low heat until all the ingredients have melted and blended together. Turn up the heat and bring to a low boil. Stir the mixture continuously until it thickens, then transfer to a bowl, and set aside to cool.

Once the mixture has cooled, place it in the fridge to set a little. You may need to occasionally stir or whisk the mixture to prevent it from getting lumpy. 

To assemble the cake - take a large serrated knife, and carefully flatten the tops off the two cakes. Then slice both cakes horizontally so that you end up with four even flat cakes. Build up the cake by layering cake, then the chilled honey cream, then cake, and so on until you have used all the layers. 

If you are serving the cake just like this, reserve some of the cream for the top of the cake to finish it. If you decide to go on and decorate like mine, make the top layer cake, and use all the cream on the inside. 

Four Layer Honey Cream Cake

For the 'Spring has Sprung' decoration

Make up the buttercream by beating the butter until pale and creamy, the gradually mixing in the icing sugar. Split the buttercream into 4 equal quantities. 

Using one quarter of the buttercream, roughly crumb coat the sides of the cake, by applying a thin layer all over. This helps to seal in the cream, and stop crumbs sticking to the finished design.

Place the cake in the fridge for 30 minutes to allow the crumb coat to set. Meanwhile, using the remaining three portions of buttercream, colour them in yellow, orange and green, and put into piping bags. 

Take the cake, and with the piping bags, pipe a row of dots vertically down the side of the cake, alternating the colours. Using a pallet knife, smudge the dots sideways to create the petal effect. Pipe the next row of dots over the tail of the smudged petal. By shifting the colour pattern up by one, you can start to build a spiral effect around the cake. Repeat until the pattern runs all the way around the cake. Then do the same on the top of the cake. Here I have made circles of the colours graduating to the centre. 

Finally to finish the cake, place some sugarpaste decorations in the centre. I made some blossoms and daffodils to finish mine, using flowerpaste rather than sugarpaste. 

Flowerpaste Daffodils and Blossoms

Of course, one of the best things about the Clandestine Cake Club, is that any cake that isn't eaten at the end of the night gets to come home! Here is my little take home tin, with a selection of yummy treats...

Honey, Fruit and Nut Flapjacks

I think everyone has a handful of easy recipes that they make over and over again because they are simple and they taste good. They become a weekly feature in the home, and almost a habit for the baker, until one weekend, you forget, or have commitments that prevent you from making that regular batch, and suddenly you break the habit and don't have any for ages. Chocolate Brownies are one of mine, and Flapjack is another.

Honey, Fruit and Nut Flapjacks

I adore flapjack for its simplicity, a few ingredients in a bowl, bake it and done, and also because it just about convinces me that I'm taking a healthy choice over cake or pudding... ok, I said just about! 

I particularly like this recipe for two reasons, one because I have adapted it over time to have the easiest list of ingredients and quantities to remember by heart, and secondly because of the use of honey rather than golden syrup, which gives the flapjack a really subtle flowery taste rather than sticky sweet. (You could always directly replace the honey for golden syrup if you wished however.)

The Recipe

100 grams butter

100 ml honey

100 grams golden caster sugar

200 grams rolled or porridge oats

100 grams mixed fruit and nuts (I have used chopped hazelnuts, dried apricots, mango and pineapple, and glace cherries here, - but feel free to mix up to your tastes with this - you could have lots of flavours like me, or keep it simple with one or two key ingredients)

Makes 16 square flapjacks, or 8 breakfast bars.

To make the flapjacks, line a 20 cm square tin with baking parchment and grease well. 

Put the butter, honey and caster sugar in a saucepan, and heat until the butter and sugar are melted and then stir all the ingredients until well combined.

Meanwhile put the rolled oats, fruit and nuts into a large bowl and stir together. Pour over the butter and honey mixture, and stir well until all of the oats and fruit are coated. 

Transfer the mixture to the lined tin, and spread evenly, pushing the mixture into the corners and pressing down flat with the back of a spoon or spatula. 

Bake in the oven at 180 degrees for 15 minutes, or until lightly golden on top. Avoid letting the edges burn.

Remove from the oven, and place on a cooling rack still in the tin. Leave to cool for 3-4 minutes, and then whilst the mixture is still warm, use a pallet knife to slice the flapjacks into the sizes required. 

Leave in the tin to cool completely, then lift out of the tin using the baking parchment. You may need to re-cut the slices here with a knife, by just cutting through the marks made with the pallet knife. 

Flapjacks will keep well in an airtight tin for 7-10 days... not that they have ever lasted that long in our house...