Good for the Bakery, Good for the Bees…

We were delighted, this weekend, to come home from the National Honey Show with an armful of awards!

We’ve had a bumper crop of honey, due to all the lovely weather this year, and have been very careful in extracting, filtering and presenting our honey for the show. There are many classes at the National Honey Show and this year there were nearly 2,000 entries across them. Being based in Brentford, we are able to enter the Middlesex County classes, the London classes and the National classes that are open to the whole of the UK.

We’ve entered honey every year that we’ve been keeping bees and were delighted that very first year to win a First Prize for our London Honey, last year, it was our Honey and Oat Cookies that came home with an award but this year we won four prizes!

As we’ve recently opened a Micro Bakery, it was important to enter one of our cakes and I carefully created a recipe that would be a rich sticky treat. We decided to enter the ‘Tray Bake with Honey’ class, I thought that the honey flavour would be most appreciated as a drizzle on the top and chose orange and cardamom as complimentary flavours and ground almonds for a moist richness.

It was a bit of a risk as not everyone likes cardamom, a spice often used in Indian cooking, however the judges loved it and gave it First Prize – the best in the country! So congratulations to the Micro Bakery and their Honey, Orange and Cardamom Cake, to make it yourself, you can find the recipe here.

Cup presentation Our honey did pretty well at the show too.

We were awarded second prize in the Middlesex County and were Very Highly Commended in London.

Every award has points attached to it and I was thrilled to discover that I had also won a cup that is engraved ‘Presented to The Best Female Beekeeper of the Year’.

Hopefully we can encourage some more of our association to enter the show next year as we have some wonderful female bee keepers that could win this cup next year!