Oh, honey

First of all, let me declare that I don't just eat sweets all day, nor do I endorse this behaviour (not publicly, at least). That being said, this is a pretty darn good cake.

It's flu season in the US and with NYC being particularly badly affected, a little honey can only help. A common East Asian remedy is "honey tea", but that tends to be sweetener and the main ingredient is invariably some anti-inflammatory ingredient like ginger or turmeric. Side bar - the chemicals (gingerols and shogaols) that make ginger gingery are related to capsaicins in peppers and thus the nostril-clearing effect.

That's not to say that honey acts simply as a spectator - it has anti-microbial properties too. When bees make honey for their own use, they store it in a hyperosmotic state (very low moisture content). This is one factor that prevents most bacteria from growing in honey, because they need water to survive. Enzymes (glucose oxidase) in the honey bee's hypopharngeal glands convert the glucose from the nectar into gluconic acid. This lowers the pH (makes the honey more acidic) and less favourable to microbes. Hydrogen peroxide is also produced.

You know that joke: Two scientists walk into a bar. The bartender asks what they would like to drink. The first scientists says "I'll have a glass of H2O please." The second scientists says "I'll have H2O too." He dies.

This process is quickened in dilute honey (not stored by the honey bee). This is why people salve honey on wounds (I've never tried this before...) and ingest it to treat gut bacteria infections. The prospect of being able to treat an infection with honey isn't interesting because it's a "natural home treatment" or whatever rubbish, it's because with bacteria gaining increasing resistance to antibiotics, we're looking to reduce our reliance on these drugs.

Anyway, different honeys have different levels of antibacterial activity and no link to geography or bee species has been found yet.

Some free links are below if you want to know more about honey (the last one is an easy read).

Bees are so amazing to me, not only because they are extremely social creatures and do a funny waggle-dance to signify distances (contender for evidence of communication in animals?) but also because they have a long relationship with humans. The earliest hunter-gatherers collected honey, depicted in cave drawings tens of thousands of years ago. Quite possibly, it was our first invertebrate-human relationship. Now humans date snakes (badum tss). My godfather's husband raised bees for a while in San Francisco, and I remember tasting honeycomb for the first time in Nevada. mmmmmm that sorta memory sticks with you (badum tss).

Can you imagine the first hominid who discovered honey, poking a noisy, oblong sac on the side of a tree, only to be greeted by a swarm of angry bees? Someone went through that so you can have this cake today. Count yo' blessings.

So it makes me kind of mad that this sort of shit happens all the time. It's just mind-boggling that on top of colony-collapse disorder, beekeepers have to face this business.

Ok now back to cake. Let's be real, I didn't make this for the health benefits. I made it because my sister loves honey and by jove, she'll have honey. Just in the buttery form of cake.

Honey Cake
see the recipe here
This cake is close to a pound cake (which makes sense because it has 0.5 pound of butter) and, unlike honey, has a moistness to it that's hard to beat. So don't be afraid of butter, I promise you'll be fine. It whips up quickly, though the mixture is viscous enough to require a table mixer, unless you have biceps of steel.

I followed the clear instructions to a t, except that I reduced the sugar from 0.75 cup to 0.5 cup, and it came out great. Love that she included a cute poem at the end.

Bonus: I just found out that there's such a thing as Mad Honey, which I think is awesome and definitely on my to-do list if I ever visit Turkey. Give the article a read!

Honey:
This would make a nice coffee table book

Review article on honey's antibacterial properties
A study on how expression of glucose oxidase changes as the bee's social role changes
An easy read about the chemistry of honey