For the last year, most of my baked goods, especially cakes and muffins are made almost exclusively using whole wheat flour (the regular chapathi/ roti flour). To be honest, I have stopped buying and using refined flour / maida. When I bake for friends, I am not sure if everyone will be happy with the healthier flour, so use refined/ all purpose flour. A few months ago, we completely switched to multigrain flour for our daily rotis. It was an easy way of introducing the benefits of various grains like jowar, bajra and ragi in our daily diet apart from whole wheat flour that we generally use. I have been wanting to use it to bake cakes and muffins, but shied away wondering if K would be able to detect it and refuse to eat it. worse still, would it be inedible and thus mean a wastage of the other precious ingredients that are used. I need not have worried. This cake turned out to be absolutely moist with a beautiful texture. It was a little too sweet for my taste, but am giving here the original quantities i used because i know most people prefer a cake to be … well, sweet.
Try it, the flavours of the honey and nutmeg blend so well, that i think this is my new best cake. move over chocolate, i think you were always overrated! here comes the nutmeg!
Eggless Multigrain Nutmeg & Honey Cake
Makes one 7 inch cake
1 cup multigrain flour (you can substitute with maida/ all purpose flour
a pinch of salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 level teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/3 cup honey
1/2 cup melted butter or oil (I used oil)
1/2 cup thick curd/ yogurt (make sure it is not sour)
1/2 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon finely powdered dry ginger
1/2 teaspoon powdered nutmeg
3-4 tablespoons finely sliced almonds
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C. butter and line a cake tin with greaseproof paper or aluminium foil
Mix together the flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, powdered sugar and nutmeg and dry ginger powder thoroughly with a whisk or a fork.
In a medium bowl, mix together the yogurt, milk, oil/ melted butter and honey.
Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients and pour in the liquid ingredients. mix together lightly with a whisk or a fork. Do not overmix.
Pour the batter into the prepared cake tin. Sprinkle the slivered almonds on top and bake for about 30-35 minutes. Check for doneness with a skewer or a knife till it comes out clean. Remove from the oven and leave to cool completely before removing the cake liner and slice.
this cake tastes best after sitting overnight. the flavours burst out when you bite in. This is a beautiful cake to serve at tea time.
Escapades 
Hi m not sure what went wrong…I used store bought multi grain aata…But my cake first did rise and then collapsed …I just made a lil change i put one tablespoon choco powder.
Cake rising and collapsing can be one of three things. Too much baking powder or soda. Too much heat (check your oven thermostat. Sometimes the reading isn’t the actual temp) and or the middle part was uncooked. Did you open the oven door where the cake was still baking?
hi, can v avoid honey and dry ginger pwdr.
wat could v substitute it with.
You can use the same quantity of golden syrup or simple sugar syrup. Or add 1/3 cup sugar mixed with 2-3 tablespoon of water. You can leave out the dry ginger powder and just go with vanilla essence.
two times i hv tried ur recipie last year n it was a big hit. planning to do it again tmrw.. thanks a lot for the superb recipie
So glad that you enjoyed this recipe. Your comment has tempted me to try and make this again! Thank you!
Dear arundati… I hv tried this cake twice last year n was a big hit. Next week goin to try it once again.. Thank you for the most healthy dish
Hi Arundati,
I tried this cake last weekend. It came out amazing. Lovely flavors. Keeper of a recipe. Thank you so much for sharing!
Thank you so much for your feedback. It is one of my favourites too and I am so glad you liked it!
What would be the proportion of flours , if we were to make out own multigrain flour at home ?
Sorry for the typo. I meant *make our own
I eyeball the quantities, but this is most likely the standard stuff:
5 parts of whole wheat flour, 1 part each of jowar (sorghum), ragi (finger millet), bajra (pearl millet), oat flour. Hope this helps
Thankyou 🙂
Hi there! Came by your food blog by chance, found this recipe interesting and tried it the very same day and it came out lovely. Loved it for the fact that its such a healthy recipe… :):) Thanks a bunch 🙂
Wow, I would love to have a slice of this. I will look for the multigrain flour.
http://saffrontrail.blogspot.com/2010/10/ukrainian-honey-cake-exotic-and-low-fat.html
look at this – almost exactly like yours!
Fantastic! I’ve been searching for a recipe for eggless cakes for ages now. I wanted to bake a good one to gift to my neighbour who doesn’t eat eggs. And this looks like the perfect recipe. Thanks!
ok, after reading this post of yours i have promptly gone and gotten myself a packet of multigrain atta 🙂 cannot resist the call of a good spiced cake thanks to you!!
u know, i did try out one cake with maida coz i jus started out with baking only whole wheat versions and i wanted to see if i was missing out on taste/softness/texture… but i find i really prefer the whole wheat and eggless versions. they just add so much more depth to the flavours!
am going to try this cake real soon… nutmeg, ginger, honey – whats not to like??! 😀
🙂 am glad you did, you will enjoy baking with it…. i agree that layers of flavours and textures always attract me to a baking recipe…. you will love it…a reader wrote to me saying she tried it twice, second time with date syrup and liquid jaggery and it was so good…so its a very accommodating recipe!
arundati! i made this right away and it turned out amazing. the kids loved it too (and one of them preferred it to my chocolate cake!). in fact i have been using my multigrain atta for everything – including baking and white sauce for a while now, and i have made a very similar cake before, but that one was just healthy and not specatcular, this is is both!!! (basically i just started using wholewheat instead of maida in everything at one point, and when i switched to multigrain i started using that instead of the wholewheat in everything). so yes, this is my current favourite too and is going to go into snack boxes until they won’t eat it anymore.
also i was looking at both pillsbury and ashirwad and find that pillsbury claims to have many more types of grains than ashirwad (though both have around 20% multigrains, the balance being wholewheat flour, so tastewise etc it should’nt be too different from regular wholewheat).
thanks for this keeper recipe. wish i could send you a pic, but am lazy just now, but i promise i will soon – along with the garden ones…
ps – how did you flake your almonds so fine? i tried but just managed to split them in too, that worked well for me of course, but just for future reference would like to know. thanks.
thanks for making it and thanks for mailing me the pics… i got pre sliced almonds from the US, but you can get a mini slicer, like a potato slicer from a good steel vessels store, ask for the ones that mithai wala’s use to slice dry fruit…i got one from there and it works great
thanks for clearing my doubts! can’t wait to try this out!
yummylicious as ever aru !! i wiil try this today 🙂
Oh…looks great… I love a cake recipe that is not too complicated 🙂
Dry ginger in a cake…hmm… sounds interesting. Have to try. Thank you for a new recipe :).
Can I ask where you get your multigrain flour?
ashirwad and pillsbury both have multigrain flour
It looks absolutely delicious and mouthwatering…thanks for another healthy recipe, arundati…
btw, the multigrain atta that you use, by any chance is it the new Aashirwad brand one? I have been using that and it gives really soft rotis, but never thought of using it for cakes, that’s why the question…
yes kary, ashirwad’s multigrain, earlier i was using the one from baba ramdev’s ashram (dont laugh, their grains and foodstuff are really good) but they’re currently out of stock