Passover Honey Cake

This Jewish honey cake is one that Grandma Yetta would make for the first and second seders at Passover. It’s so simple — honey, ginger, cinnamon and, surprisingly, coffee give it its depth of flavor. However, there’s no reason you can’t make it any time of the year when you want a Jewish dessert.

Passover Honey Cake

Because it’s for Passover, this cake has to be unleavened. Therefore, it uses matzo cake meal and potato starch instead of flour and cornstarch. Cornstarch is not kosher for Passover. However, you could easily modify this recipe if making this Jewish dessert for another time of the year.

Matzo cake meal

Matzo cake meal is finely ground-up matzo. We thought we could find it at our local grocery store. We were wrong.

What we could find was matzo meal — just without the cake part in there. So I ground up some legit matzo to add to it. Our food processor is on the fritz so I used an old fashioned mortar and pestle. This time around I worked with store-bought matzo. If I’d had my food processor, I would have used my homemade matzo instead.

I found out after the fact from my cousin Dorrie — the keeper of family recipes — that putting the matzo meal in a food processor would have given it the cake-like consistency we needed. Oh, well. Next time we’ll be sure to get the food processor working. For this Passover sponge cake recipe that also uses matzo meal, I ended up using a handheld mortar and pestle to grind it into flour.

Still, I know I’ll never get it as fine as the commercial mill would. It doesn’t affect the taste, but the cake is a bit more coarse. If you are using a coarse meal, add two tablespoons more since a coarser meal measures differently than the finer meal.

Ingredients

• 4 large eggs, separated
• 1 cup dark honey
• 3/4 cups sugar.
• 3/4 cup strong black coffee
• 3/4 cup matzo cake meal If you use a coarse meal, add two tablespoons.
• 3/4 cup potato starch, sifted
• 3/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 3/4 teaspoon ginger
• 2 teaspoon orange zest (optional)
• 1/2 cup coarsely chopped walnuts

Instructions 

• Separate eggs and beat the whites until stiff, set aside.
• Beat egg yolks and sugar until their color is lemon yellow.
• Add honey and coffee to the egg yolk mix and blend thoroughly.
• Blend in matzo cake meal and potato starch with cinnamon and ginger.
• Blend in the walnuts and orange zest (if using).
• When the mixture is well blended, fold in the egg whites. Fold just enough to incorporate the egg white, but make sure the egg white is fully blended to avoid cooked eggs in your cake.
• Pour into a nonstick or parchment lined loaf pan.
• Place in a preheated 300 F oven. Bake for about an hour. The finished cake should pass the toothpick test.

Flatter cake than I would have liked

In fact, the last time we made this, it felt like all of the ingredients sunk to the bottom of the pan. It ended up quite flat. Dorrie says that’s not how it’s supposed to look. So, at first I thought that not putting the matzo meal in the food processor to make it more like a cake flour was my mistake. Next time I will spend more time whipping the egg whites to add some more fluff to the batter.

Also, Dorrie told me, make sure you use large eggs, not extra large eggs in the recipe. That’s simply too much egg.

If you don’t want to deal with matzo meal and need a fast, dessert to bring to a non-kosher Passover seder, I love the idea of this no-bake cheesecake. Again, it might not be kosher but it is definitely perfect for a dairy meal.