Stick with syrup for a gold-standard “honey” cake

IT IS honey-cake season, which means that it is time to head out — not to don beekeeping gear and unload the hive, nor to a specialist foodie store selling different honeys and not even to the honey aisle in the supermarket. No, it is time to stock up on golden syrup.

Golden syrup gives the sweet flavour to many a piece of honey cake that you are likely to be served over the new year festivities. It is the staple of my family’s default cake, the recipe sent home by our nursery teachers more than three decades ago and also in the books of some posher culinary sources, such as Nigella Lawson.

A few weeks ago I realised how far golden syrup has infiltrated the honey cake tradition, as I watched my brother Zak at the luggage conveyer of Ben Gurion Airport, holding a bottle of British golden syrup to prepare honey cake in his home in Israel. There he was, arriving in the land of milk and honey and bringing synthetic honey substitute with him.

I t i s f i t t i ng t hat golden syrup should be adopted to mark a biblically-appointed festival. Most people never notice but if you take a close look at the tin (or nowadays bottle) of the best-known brand of golden syrup, Lyle’s, you will see a picture of a lion.

“Out of the strong came forth sweetness,” it says, underneath. This wisdom comes straight from the Book of Judges, in which Samson sets a riddle for the Philistines. In its full form it reads: “Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet.”

Samson drew the riddle from his experience — he had killed a lion and subsequently found bees and honey in the carcass. He ate the honey and gave some to his parents. Abram Lyle, the man who launched Lyle’s golden syrup, was a religious Christian and an elder of St Michael’s Presbyterian Church in Greenock, so he looked for a biblical source that would connect his syrup to honey, which it imitates. Golden syrup proved to be not just as sweet as honey but also as long-lasting. Captain Scott took golden syrup with him on his ill-fated Antarctic expedition in 1910 and when some of it was found 46 years later, it was still in good condition. So if you have a very old tin at home, you could probably — and no liability accepted here — still use it and get baking. If you do have an old tin, its appearance may surprise you. We live in an age when food packaging constantly changes — gone are the heady days of the foil wrappers on KitKats and Dairy Milk, while the Smarties tube has gained a hexagonal dimension. Yet a decades-old tin of Lyle’s golden syrup will look just like one you could buy today. In 2007, Guinness World Records declared the tin to be the world’s oldest unchanged brand packaging. It looks almost as it did when the tin took shape in 1883 and altered only temporarily when obliged to do so by war-time rules. With more than a million packages of golden syrup leaving Lyle’s Thameside plant every month, not to mention the syrup made by other companies, golden syrup is dribbled or poured on to many a pancake, bowl of porridge or piece of toast every day. Its appeal as a honey-cake ingredient was initially price, as syrup was many times cheaper than honey. But either the salaries for bees have dropped or honey production has been made more cost-effective. Today honey does not need to be a highly priced item — you can get a 340g jar for 99p in supermarkets.

Nevertheless, many of us continue to bake with golden syrup — and even fly it thousands of miles to do so. And why not? The sweetness of golden syrup is intense, perhaps more so than honey which has more complexity to its flavour and can result in a heaviertasting cake.

We are creatures of habit, especially with our festival traditions and we love what we are used to. And golden syrup cake is a specifically British take on the traditional recipe — it is our great British Rosh Hashanah bake.

After all, an American friend of mine, who is an enthusiastic baker, was incredulous when I checked in with her about her nation’s honey cake-baking traditions.

“Carrot cake has carrots, banana cake has bananas and honey cake has honey in it,” she said sternly, declaring herself “very thrown”.

I resisted the temptation to complicate things by raising the subject of teacakes and decided to give her a few weeks to regain her composure, before presenting her with a genuine British honey cake — the honey-less kind.

The words on the tin come from the Book of Judges’