Giant beehive cake

Bee is a bit of a dab hand in the kitchen when she wants to be, and after giving her recipe books as Christmas and birthday presents for the last two or three years, she has recently finally got the hint and started making me some cakes.

“Hooray!” I cheered.

“Is that why you’ve been buying me cake books all this time?” she asks, eyeing me suspiciously.

Well dur.

For ages now I’ve been wanting her to try out the giant silicone beehive cake mould we got from Betterware. I thought it would be cute, a Bee baking bees, so this week she gave it a go.

This is the mould, and this is what you’re aiming for in the end:

She used this recipe, taken from the Betterware blog, created especially for the mould:

You will need

• 170g Clear Honey
• 140g Unsalted Butter
• 85g Light Muscovado Sugar
• 2 Medium eggs
• 200g Self Raising Flour
• Bee Hive Silicone Mould

Inside the cake

• 55g Icing Sugar
• 1 tablespoon Clear Honey
• Hot Water

To decorate

• 75g Icing Sugar
• Water

Here’s what you do

1. First up pre heat the oven to 180c/350f/Gas 3
2. Grease the inside of your mould lightly with butter or cake release. Make sure you grease every crease and fold to ensure your cake is easily removed once baked. This is a really crucial bit, so I stood and watched over Bee’s shoulder as she greased, saying really unhelpful and annoying things like ‘make sure you grease everywhere really well’.
3. Add the honey, muscovado sugar, butter and a tablespoon of water into a large pan. Gently heat until the mixture is melted
4. Beat eggs and sieve flour Everything seemed to be going well at this point, so I retired to the lounge for a little sit down.
5. Remove from the heat and mix in the eggs and flour
6. Spoon mixture evenly into both sides of the mould and bake for 40 to 45 minutes. Your cake should be springy to touch. Poke a sharp knife through the cake, if it comes out clean your cake is ready. I’d been sitting down for some time, and was getting concerned that the spooning stage was lasting quite a long time. I went into the kitchen, where I found Bee looking grumpy. “It’s rubbish,” she said, “you can’t put it in the oven because it just flops all over the place.” I gave her one of the looks I always mean to be sympathetic but which tend to come out as patronising, got out a baking tray to put it on, and we were back on track.
7. Leave to cool on a wire rack before gently removing the cake from the mould

It was at the ‘bake for 40-45mins’ bit that things went a bit wrong. 40 -45mins is a long time, and after 30 minutes, our beehive was already blackening around the edges. Whether it was user or designer error I don’t know, but the mould had bent out of shape, weighed down with cake mixture, meaning it didn’t rise evenly. I think we’d need to practise this a bit.

On the plus side,  the pattern looked really good when you turned it out, but the way it had risen just wasn’t conducive to constructing a beehive. We tried trimming it, to create flat surfaces that we could stick together, but the amount we had to trim meant we were really just left with a 2D drawing of a beehive.

I asked Bee to sum up her beehive baking experience, and here’s what she said:

Pros

• Recipe was easy to do
• Mould was easy to grease
• Pattern came out nicely

Cons

• Mould was a bit flimsy
• Rose weirdly
• Wasn’t the tastiest cake ever
• Couldn’t stick together
• Got annoyed with it a lot

So there you go, that sums it up pretty nicely I think.