Food
Honey and spice and all things nice...
One of the co-founders of the Middle Eastern restaurant Honey & Co shares the inspiration for their new baking book
August 12, 2015 16:01
By, Anonymous
1 min read
One of the co-founders of the Middle Eastern restaurant Honey & Co shares the inspiration for their new baking book
August 12, 2015 16:01ByAnonymous, Anonymous
Our original business plan for Honey & Co didn't contain a single cake.
I told Itamar I needed the place to be about chopping vegetables, roasting meats and grilling fish. But when we saw 25a Warren Street in London W1, with its beautiful big front window, I knew that cakes would have to be a part of what we were going to do.
We set about creating our own cake identity. Itamar suggested fruit and lots of colour so that it would look like a Middle Eastern marketplace, and I started with that. Then he suggested spice and coffee and honey, and I added them to the mix.
This is how we work together: we develop, we taste, we get excited and angry, and occasionally disappointed when something fails. But it is by far the most creative environment I have ever worked in. Those of you who have read our previous book will know that Itamar loves his cakes and sweets, and that he is my biggest inspiration. He dreams of cakes and I try my best to fulfil his dreams.
Sometimes I hate Itamar's ideas and we argue - but at other times what he wants makes perfect sense to me.
Sometimes I make something that I love and he hates (or thinks is too sweet, or not sweet enough, or too ugly, or too pretty) and I get really offended. I take it personally, for a while… But then we let our staff taste it and give their opinions, and we fix the things that have gone wrong and together we create something special. There is nothing quite like it.
The peach, vanilla and fennel seed cakes were created while we were working on our first book. We would have long afternoon meetings with Elizabeth, our publisher, in her office across the road from our restaurant. Tea was always involved and, inevitably, cakes.
One autumn afternoon she produced a humble-looking loaf cake, delicately flavoured with caraway seeds, which we both went mad for.
I had never heard of or tasted seed cake before, and this was particularly good (it's a Delia Smith recipe, and it's perfect). Seeds and spices are right up our alley, so we adopted the idea with gusto and experimented a lot, with varying degrees of success. Not to replace the traditional recipe, just to offer another option. This one proved to be a great triumph.
Now bake your own:
Peach, vanilla and fennel seed mini loaves
Honey & Co's Tunisian maakouda
Recipes adapted from Honey & Co The Baking Book by Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich, Saltyard Books, £25