Cake Slice: Chai Cake with Honey Ginger Cream

This month, the Cake Slice Bakers whipped up Chai Cake with Honey Ginger Cream. (Doesn't that just sound wonderful? Honey. Ginger. Cream.)

This is the seventh cake we've baked from the book "Sky High:Irresistible Triple Layer Cakes" by Alisa Huntsman and Peter Wynne. We're baking from this book for a year and after that, it's on to another cookbook.

This was a spice cake, but not your mama's spice cake, I dare say. Unless your mama is from India, where chai tea is popular. (On a side note, I had an Indian roommate once upon a time and she faithfully made chai tea every morning, heating spices, tea, and milk in a pan. Our house always smelled so goooood!)

Cardomom is a key player in chai, but a little cardomom goes a long way for me. So I added more cinnamon and less cardomom than called for in the recipe. I also added some fresh ground nutmeg and cloves.

And how was it? It smelled lovely and tasted delicious. I thought it was a tad dry, but that might have been my fault. I might have left the cake layers out too long to cool.

As you can see, mine was for a birthday. I was low on time so resorted to using sprinkles. Yeah, sprinkles!! (That's a chunk of fresh ginger there on the side.)


As usual, with a crowd present, it's difficult to get a good photo of the interior of the cake (What do you mean, you want to eat cake right now? You can't wait a half hour until I get the perfect shot of a single slice of cake? Sheesh, so inconsiderate.) . This shot was as good as it got.


Everyone seemed to really enjoy the cake.


The icing was delicious. I've never used honey in icing before and I liked the subtle flavor it gave. I made some modifications to the icing so I could ice the cake in the traditional way. I added powdered sugar until it was thick enough to ice the sides, and added a little salt to counteract the extra sweetness. I halved the honey. I added more ginger but should have left it alone. The flavor of the fresh ginger in the icing developed as time went on.

All in all, it was a great cake and once again, I'm impressed with the variety of icings in this book. They've all been fantastic.

You can find the recipe ----> here.

OK, see you next month!