Chocolate Honey Cake

Make the dough. Combine the honey, butter, and sugar in a single container.

Melt over a double boiler or in the microwave. This time I used the microwave — it's much simpler and faster, just make sure to take it out and stir periodically.

Add the slaked baking soda to the hot mixture and stir well — the mixture should lighten significantly in color.

Lightly beat the eggs.

Add the honey mixture and beat together.

Add the flour mixed with cocoa and knead into a dough. The dough will be warm and sticky — that's perfectly normal. Don't add extra flour, or the layers will turn out dense and tough.

Divide the dough into 5 portions. Grease a baking sheet with butter, place the dough on it, and roll out into a large rectangle. To do this, I drew a 30×25 cm rectangle on parchment paper with a pencil, placed it over the dough (pencil side up), and used it as a guide while rolling. You can also stretch the dough with your hands, or make round layers the same way as in the Honey Cake mentioned at the beginning.

Prick all over with a fork.

Bake in an oven preheated to 200°C (400°F). Bake for 3–6 minutes (I baked mine for 5 minutes). Keep a close eye on them — the layers are dark to begin with, so it's easy to miss when they're done. They bake very quickly!

Bake the remaining layers the same way. Trim each finished layer to 30×25 cm, then cut in half — you'll end up with 10 layers total. I used two of them for the crumb coating and 8 for the cake itself.

Make the cream. Add the powdered sugar and vanilla sugar to the sour cream, then gently fold together using a bottom-to-top motion. Do not whip! This method keeps the sour cream thick, which is important since we're not using heavy cream — sour cream tends to become very runny when whipped, which won't work here. Because we're using powdered sugar instead of regular sugar, there's no issue with it dissolving. If your sour cream is very tart, use more powdered sugar. The layers and cream can be made the day before (refrigerate the cream), and the cake can be assembled the next day.

Assemble the cake. Stack all the layers (I used 8), spreading cream between each one, and frost the top and sides as well. Use all the cream — I weigh it out to make sure.

Make the topping. Melt the white chocolate.

Pour onto a sheet of bubble wrap and spread evenly (wash the bubble wrap with soap and dry it beforehand). Refrigerate until set.

Peel the chocolate off the bubble wrap. Apparently, before I got to it, some bubble-wrap stress-poppers had already gotten to it)) so some of the bubbles didn't leave a deep enough impression))

Place the chocolate on top of the cake (bubble side up). Coat the sides with crumbs made from the remaining layers, blended into fine crumbs. Refrigerate to soak, ideally overnight.

Make the bees. Melt 30 g of dark chocolate with 1–2 tsp of cream until smooth.

Transfer to a small piping bag and pipe small bee body shapes. Then draw on stripes and eyes — I used a yellow sugar pen; if you don't have one, white chocolate works great for the stripes too.

Use sliced almonds to make the wings. Your bee squad is ready))

Using a piping bag with the corner snipped off, fill the "honeycomb" cells with melted honey. Now wait for your bees to arrive.

A slice.

The bees are in place — time to serve. This tender, soft, and incredibly fragrant chocolate honey cake will delight adults and kids alike. My daughter, of course, insisted on getting a slice with a bee on it — and then happily ate all the rest of them too)) I think honey cake is the ultimate all-purpose cake: equally wonderful for a special occasion or a cozy cup of tea at home. Everyone loves honey cake!