Honey cupcakes

I was recently given a giant bottle of honey and I scratched my head for a while until it occurred to me that I could bake with it. Google revealed that honey cakes are a traditional Jewish holiday treat and there were raves for Canadian baker extraordinaire Marcy Goldman's Majestic and Moist Honey Cake recipe. I decided to give it a try until I realized I didn't have cloves, allspice, brown sugar, whiskey, or orange juice. Despite a number of substitutions and changes including halving the total sugar content, my hacked recipe turned out delicious and I would definitely do it again!

• Honey cupcakes
•  
• 1/2 cdried blueberries
• 1 bowlwater
•  
• 3 1/2 call-purpose flour
• 1 Tbspbaking powder
• 1 tspbaking soda
• 1/2 tspsalt
• 4 tspground cinnamon
• 1 tspground nutmeg
• 1/2 tspground ginger
•  
• 1 cgranulated sugar
• 3eggs
• 1 choney
• 1 coil
• 3/4 capple juice
• 2 tspvanilla extract
• 1 cstrong rooibos tea
• Handfulsliced almonds
•  
• Soak dried blueberries in water until no longer hard, approximately an hour.
•  
• Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger. Set flour mixture aside.
•  
• Beat eggs with sugar.
•  
• Mix honey, oil, and juice well. Add to eggs and mix well. Mix in vanilla and tea. Fold in flour mixture and stir in drained blueberries. Spoon batter into medium cupcake papers until about 2/3 full and top with sliced almonds. Bake at 350 degrees F for 12 minutes.

As I was pulling my ingredients together in the beginning, I remembered I had a bag of dried, sweetened blueberries from Costco. By soaking them in water, they became juicy again without the wet mess associated with fresh blueberries. I find these dried blueberries too sweet on their own, but they were perfect in the cupcakes:


One of my substitutions was the rooibos tea for what was generically called "warm coffee or strong tea." I didn't have any orange pekoe and didn't want to use green or Earl Grey, so the only option was my pear flavoured rooibos. I didn't taste the pear in the final outcome and think any rooibos would have worked.

The batter was liquidy and some reviewers of the original recipe say their cake pans overran, but my batter only rose a little. My biggest surprise was how much batter I ended up with - there were 3 1/2 cups of flour after all. In total, I ended up with 36 medium cupcakes, 2 7.75x5.5 oval cakes (approximately 1" high and 18 minutes in the oven), and 12 mini cupcakes (10 minutes). This is what the finished medium-sized cupcakes looked like:


The cakes were super moist and tender, and the occasional blueberry added just the right amount of juicy sweetness:


Today is my brother Allan's birthday, but he couldn't try my baking because he has been living in Asia for several years. No matter, I stuck a candle in a cupcake and celebrated anyway!