Sunny Honey Bunny Cake and Honey Cake Round-up

These sweet juicy carrots came this week, just in time for honey cake baking.  I had been planning to make a sunny honey cake with whole and ground sunflower seeds, so it seemed providential that it should become a sunny bunny honey cake with the addition of carrots.

I already made this vegan honey cake, so I was planning to make this cake with eggs, but the sunflower seeds and soymilk provided all the richness and structure the cake needed, and I just didn't add the eggs after all and there it is.

I recall once hearing a radio interview with the great Mel Blanc, who provided the voices for Bugs Bunny and almost all the other Looney Tunes characters.  Blanc was an amazingly gifted voice actor who could make almost any sound. The one sound he could not make was the sound of a crunching carrot, so in every single performance over the course of his decades-long career as Bugs, he had to eat actual carrots while doing the dialogue.  Oh, did he get tired of carrots. He tried crunching apples, crackers, every crunchy food they could provide, but nothing made a sound sufficiently carrot-like to suit the master's standards.  Thus did he suffer for his art.


Sunny  Bunny Honey Cake

7 ounces (1 1/2 cups) sunflower seeds
24 ounces all purpose flour (You may use part whole wheat flour)

2 cups sugar  (half or all brown)

2 tablespoos baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 teaspoon ginger

2 oranges

1 lemon
15 ounces (1 1/2 cups) bamboo honey

1 1/2 cup soy milk or other milk
12 ounces sunflower oil (or 1 12.7 ounce bottle) Any sunflower oil is fine, but if you can get this wonderful buttery, nutty unrefined sunflower oil you will be glad you did.

7 medium carrots 18 ounces after peeling  (4 cups) 

Additional raw sunflower seeds for topping


Heat oven to 400 F. 

Prepare 3 medium ring-shaped cake pans (the vegan batter produces a lower volume)

Toast the sunflower seeds, and grind them up in a processor or mortar.

Wash, peel and grind or grate the carrots,

Sift together the dry ingredients.  Whisk in the toasted sunflower meal. 

Cut the oranges and lemon into pieces

Blend the citrus bits in a blender with 1/2 cup of the soymilk,  add the honey and vanilla. With the blender running, drizzle in the oil. If you want eggs, replace the last cup of soymilk with 4 eggs.  otherwise, pour the honey-oil sauce onto the dry ingredients, and blend the remaining cup of soymilk in the blender to free up all the delicious bits clinging to the sides. Mix the batter gently and fold in the carrots.  Pour into baking pans and sprinkle raw sunflower seeds on top.

Bake 10 minutes at 400, 20 minutes at 375, 25 minutes at 350, and leave in the turned-off hot oven for another 15 minutes.  (Egg-free baking takes longer.  Smaller pans might have been good)

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Chayale Palevski's Honey Teygelekh and Ingberlekh