I read Samin Nosrat’s recipe for the famous Russian Honey Cake of the 20th Century Cafe in San Francisco a few months ago. If there’s one thing I regret never eating all the years we lived in the SF Bay Area, it’s this cake. When I read Samin’s recipe, I noticed how she burned the honey; that was one of the ideas I wanted to incorporate into this cake. The second excuse to make this pound cake came from my pantry. I have a lot of random boxes of tea with 1 to 2 Tbsp of leftover tea leaves or the dust that sits inside after all the leaves are used; this is my way of using that up. Earl Grey tea, which contains bergamot, is perfect in this burnt honey combination, but other fragrant teas will work just as great.

If you bake a lot of cakes, you’ll notice that I change things around in the formula of this recipe, especially when the butter and salt go into the batter preparation. I did this to get a better texture and prevent certain things from happening