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Honey Butter Cake

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Honey Butter Cake – a honey infused layer cake recipe topped with honey cream cheese frosting and drizzled with a dramatic honey butterscotch glaze.

Honey Butter Cake | honey cake with honey cream cheese frosting topped with a honey butterscotch glaze | by Carrie Sellman for TheCakeBlog.com

Honey Butter Cake | honey cake with honey cream cheese frosting topped with a honey butterscotch glaze | by Carrie Sellman for TheCakeBlog.com

Today’s cake is the ultimate for honey lovers.  The tender honey infused cake is delicious all by itself, straight out of the oven, with its buttery undertones and mellow sweetness.  If you can resist the wafts of honey in the air, you’ll be rewarded when this cake pairs up with the tangy-sweet honey cream cheese frosting.  Then comes the dramatic drip of liquid sunshine – the glistening honey butterscotch glaze, gently poured over the top and allowed to cascade down the sides.  Sprinkle with a light dusting of sanding sugar and serve with an extra drizzle of honey butterscotch.

Honey Butter Cake | honey cake with honey cream cheese frosting topped with a honey butterscotch glaze | by Carrie Sellman for TheCakeBlog.com

Honey Butter Cake | honey cake with honey cream cheese frosting topped with a honey butterscotch glaze | by Carrie Sellman for TheCakeBlog.com

Honey Butter Cake | honey cake with honey cream cheese frosting topped with a honey butterscotch glaze | by Carrie Sellman for TheCakeBlog.com

Honey Butter Cake | honey cake with honey cream cheese frosting topped with a honey butterscotch glaze | by Carrie Sellman for TheCakeBlog.com

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Honey Butter Cake

Honey Butter Cake | honey cake with honey cream cheese frosting topped with a honey butterscotch glaze | by Carrie Sellman for TheCakeBlog.com
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4.7 from 6 reviews

A honey infused layer cake recipe topped with honey cream cheese frosting and drizzled with a dramatic honey butterscotch glaze.

  • Author: Carrie Sellman
  • Yield: One 8" Round Cake (3 layers)
  • Category: ✽ ✽ ✽ ✽

Ingredients

For the Honey Cake:

  • 3 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup buttermilk
  • ½ cup honey
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla
  • 8 ounces unsalted butter, room temperature
  • 1 ½ cups sugar
  • 4 eggs, room temperature

For the Honey Cream Cheese Frosting:

  • 12 ounces unsalted butter, room temperature
  • 8 ounces cream cheese, softened
  • 4 – 6 cups confectioners’ sugar
  • ⅓ cup honey

For the Honey Butterscotch Glaze:

  • ⅓ cup sugar
  • ¼ cup honey
  • ½ cup heavy cream
  • 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
  • pinch of fine sea salt
  • gold sanding sugar (optional)

Instructions

Make the Honey Cake:

  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Butter and lightly flour three 8″ round pans.
  2. In medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt.   Set aside.
  3. In small bowl, mix together the buttermilk, honey and vanilla.  Set aside.
  4. In bowl of stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter and sugar on medium speed 4 minutes until fluffy.
  5. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition and scraping down sides of bowl as needed.
  6. Gradually add the dry and wet ingredients, alternating, starting and ending with dry ingredients.  Mix until just combined, being careful not to over mix.
  7. Divide batter evenly between the three 8″ round pans.
  8. Bake for 30-35 minutes, until toothpick inserted into center comes out clean.
  9. Let cool in pans for 10 to 15 minutes, then remove to wire rack to finish cooling.

Make the Honey Cream Cheese Frosting:

  1. In bowl of stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat butter and cream cheese until combined.
  2. Gradually add confectioners’ sugar and continue to mix, scraping down sides of bowl as needed.
  3. Add honey and mix until smooth.

Make the Honey Butterscotch Glaze:

  1. Combine sugar and honey in a medium pan over medium heat.  Stir until the sugar dissolves and you have a liquid.
  2. Continue to cook without stirring, swirling pan occasionally.  Mixture will bubble and start to darken in color.
  3. Once mixture is butterscotch brown, stir using a wooden spoon and remove from heat.
  4. Carefully pour in the cream and stir until combined.
  5. Add butter and stir until smooth.  Add salt and stir once more.
  6. Let sauce cool completely before using on the cake!  This can be made in advance and stored in the refrigerator.  Allow glaze to come to room temperature before using so that it pours easily.

Assemble the Cake:

  1. Place one layer of cake onto serving plate or cake stand and top with about one cup of honey cream cheese frosting.  Repeat with second cake layer, more frosting and then last layer of cake.
  2. Crumb coat and frost cake with remaining frosting.  Refrigerate for 20 minutes or until frosting is set.
  3. Drizzle butterscotch glaze over the top with small drips overflowing the edge. Refrigerate for 20 minutes or until glaze is set.  Sprinkle top with gold sanding sugar, if desired.

Notes

  • You may bake this as two full-sized 8″ round cake layers, with an increased bake time. Alternatively, I baked it as three intentionally shorter 8″ round layers that do not need to be torted (cut in half horizontally).
  • If frosting is too thin after whipping, refrigerate for 30 minutes before assembling cake.  The chilled frosting will have a thicker consistency.  For an even thicker consistency, add additional confectioners’ sugar as desired.
  • Find helpful tips on how to make beautiful drips here.
  • Store in refrigerator.  Serve at room temperature.

 

 

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Honey Butter Cake | honey cake with honey cream cheese frosting topped with a honey butterscotch glaze | by Carrie Sellman for TheCakeBlog.com

 

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Carrie Sellman , Founder & Editor

Carrie Sellman is the Founder & Editor of The Cake Blog. Her work has been published in BRIDES Magazine, Country Living Magazine and featured online at People, Today, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Redbook, Real Simple, TLC, The Cooking Channel and more.

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Comments

  1. Absolutely fabulous photos Carrie! Certainly makes me want to run straight to the kitchen and make this! Thank you for sharing the recipe, defo gonna try this one. 🙂

  2. Your photo’s of this cake are beautiful! I love the glaze; it reminds me of a vintage recipe I have for honeyscotch icing.

  3. This cake looks beautiful. Think that will be this weekends family treat, thanks so much for sharing with us all xx

  4. This cake looks perfect. Beautiful photos. Can’t wait to try this, but I know mine won’t look quite like yours!

  8. You’re photos are absolutely gorgeous! I’m just starting out in the blogging world and am slowly working my way up in skill level, but I hope they look like yours someday 🙂 Plus the cake is definitely drool-worthy!

    • Thank you Valerie! Keep shooting every chance you get – it’s all about practice. Just take a look through my older posts and you’ll see that improvement comes with practice, practice, practice. Good luck!

    • Congrats Tiani! The cake itself is very nice and stable, worthy of a wedding cake. The frosting is cream cheese based which means it needs to kept refrigerated. Just something to keep in mind for wedding logistics.

  10. Carrie:

    How did you get the frosting so perfect around the outside of the cake? What tool did you use?

    Thanks!

  11. Hi, I have tried making this three times now, and each time I have the same problem – when I take it out of the oven it shrinks at the sides and sinks right down. I follow the instructions and it is fully baked, and the last time I added some extra bicard to counter the acidity of the buttermilk. Any ideas why it is doing this? I can’t waste any more ingredients.

    • Hi Lizzie! I’m so sorry to hear you’re having trouble with this recipe. I’m not sure what is going on. This recipe is based on a cupcake recipe we published back in 2011 – which has been well loved over the last four years. Without being in the kitchen with you, it is hard to trouble shoot!

    • Hi, Lizzie-

      I was going to use this recipe for students in a pastry class, and not only did I and the other instructor have the same issue when trying out the recipe. We tweaked ingredients and oven temps, to no avail. All four trials shrunk – some as much as half an inch. The oven temp was spot-on, pans were never to crowded in the oven…overmixing wasn’t an issue. It is possible that the wet ingredients are very heavy, and that the 2:20 minute mixing time is too short. You don’t want to futz with leaveners too much, as that can result in a coarse crumb. The solution still remains a mystery and we decided on another honey cake formula for our students.

      • Hi Jeanne! I’m sorry to hear you had trouble with this recipe. Perhaps it’s a difference in the acidity of the honey, which can have a fairly wide range based on the floral sources used to create it.

        Another possibility is that you were expecting the height of a traditional cake layer. We are intentionally baking this in three 8″ round pans to create shorter than usual cake layers, eliminating the need to torte it. One less step for everyone! The layers do not need to be split in half and are ready to be stacked with frosting.

        • Nope, height & size weren’t factors – and layers weren’t torted. Not sure how that would have affected shrinkage around the edge anyway. The honey question is interesting, but two types were used by both of us in our lab/kitchens, so that’s out, too. Just one of those chemical things we sometimes can’t pin down, I suppose. In my years of baking & teaching, this happens occasionally. Could be humidity affecting formulas, could be oven quirks – who knows!

  13. I made this cake over the weekend and it was delicious! Soft, tender and the honey really stands out. My family loved it! I will definitely make this one again! Thank you for the recipe!

  15. OMG! I could not wait to make this cake and it turned out absolutely amazing! I posted a picture on Instagram and tagged you. Thank you for this recipe!

  16. Hi, Good day Carrie,

    May i know if i can waive the honey for the butterscotch recipe ?
    So anything can instead honey ?

    thanks

    STing

    • We really loved how the honey flavor in the cake, frosting and butterscotch complement each other. However, if you’d rather skip the honey in the butterscotch glaze, you could use a traditional butterscotch recipe that includes brown sugar, cream and butter.

  17. Hi Carrie,

    Great looking cake.Sounds amazinggg!!…….I wanna try this over the weekend.A quick question can i add food coloring to the cake or to the frosting for a kid’s birthday??

  18. Hi Carrie! Could you please let me know how many cups of batter comes out of this recepie? I am going to attempt to bake 3 tiered wedding cake for my wedding and I love honey cake flavor.
    thank you !
    Anna

  20. We in the UK. And it’s very hard to find buttermilk. Are there any alternatives I can use instead?

    • Sue, you can create your own buttermilk by adding a tablespoon or two (usually two, in my experience), of vinegar or lemon juice to a cup of milk. Stir just to incorporate the vinegar or juice, then let the milk sit for about five minutes, until the acid in the liquid has slightly thickened and curdled the milk. Use it exactly as you would buttermilk.

  21. I only have 9″ round pans; can this substitution be made? Do you know the baking time adjustment?

    • You could certainly use a 9″ round pan. Unfortunately, I have not baked this as a 9″ so I cannot give you specifics for the baking time. Here’s some general adjustment guidelines:

      If you choose to do three 9″ rounds, you’ll bake for less time than stated in the recipe above. (The resulting layers are thinner and will bake faster.)

      If you choose to do only two 9″ rounds, you’ll bake longer than stated in the recipe above. (The resulting layers are thicker and will take longer to bake.) You may also want to torte your layers (slice in half horizontally) after cooling. So you’ll have a 4 layer finished cake.

  22. Another UK based question that I have yet to find a good answer to. We don’t have block cream cheese here in the UK, just the stuff in tubs which is already pre whipped and makes too soft frosting when used in a cream cheese frosting. I know I could just add more sugar but I hate too sweet frosting. Is there a good suggestion that you might have for an alternative method for using cream cheese that doesn’t force me to make sugar coma-inducing frosting?

    • Well Annie, you just taught me something! I had no idea that cream cheese in the UK was different than what we have here in the US.

      Typically the solution would be to add more sugar, but I agree about too sugary frosting. You could try swapping out some of the cream cheese for butter to see if that helps. Perhaps use 4 ounces less cream cheese and 4 ounces more butter, hoping the butter would give some extra stability while still keeping some of the cream cheese taste.

      Let us know if you give it a try!

  23. Mind blowing butter cake recipe with the goodness of natural honey. I would definitely try this out at home. Nothing can beat the taste of a homemade cake. I found this particular butter pound cake quite healthy and fluffy. Now I must try this delicious looking honey butter cake for a new sumptuous affair.

    • Personally, I prefer a firmer frosting for under fondant, like a ganache or swiss meringue buttercream. This frosting is delicious but definitely better suited for a casual cake.

  25. I made the cupcakes and the cake…I love cake and so does my family. Good quality honey is key!
    Wish I could post a pic of mine! I experimented with Swiss meringue buttercream because with the honey in the cake and the honey cream chese and butterscotch it was a little too sweet for my liking and took away from the honey flavor in the cake. Sooo good! Love your pics and your blog!

    • So glad you and your family enjoyed it Paula! I’d love to see a photo – just tag @thecakeblog on Instagram or use hashtag #thecakeblog! That’s the best way to share it with us. 📷🍰📷

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