I have reviewed a great many dishes in this region, and I have never before watched one win. That is the only word for what Nana Ferrow’s honey cake has done to Wexamour this season. Since Clementine Ferrow-Aldworth published the whole long aching history of the thing in the Rolling Downs pages, you cannot walk the University mesa or the Millhaven market or a single lane of the Downs without passing a cooling rack, a queue, or an argument about cardamom. Every stall I went to and every cook I talked to swore theirs was the closest to true.

The Run on the Ridge

Before I tell you how it tastes, I must tell you what it costs, because the price is no longer measured only in coin. The recipe asks two things the region cannot presently keep in stock: three eggs to a cake, and Dorran honey, which the Ferrow account insists, with a stubbornness I have come to admire, cannot be swapped for just any clover honey from the northern Downs. The result is the first genuine shortage of my reviewing life. The egg baskets at Millhaven are bare by mid-morning. And the honey, which comes from a single family on the single ridge above Brannock Crossing, has become the most fought-over substance in Wexamour.

I made the walk up the ridge myself, as the Ferrow column instructs, with coin and patience, and found the beekeeper among the veils and the smoke. The Dorrans are famously a family of few words, and the present holder of that name did not break the tradition for me. I asked how the season had treated his trade. He looked out over the hives a long moment, and said: “Sales tripled. Bees tired.” That was the interview. It was also, I think, the most honest review the cake has yet received.

The Verdict

And the cake itself? It is, I am almost annoyed to report, as good as the hysteria claims. The crumb is dense and damp without being heavy, the Dorran honey carries a wildflower bitterness under the sweet that clover honey from the northern Downs simply does not have, and the lemon in the frosting keeps the whole thing from cloying. A lesser critic would stop there and award it the season and go home. But I find I cannot review this cake honestly without naming the strangeness at the center of it, which is that we have all fallen in love with a cake that was built to mean spring returning, baked for the first warm day after a hard winter, in a region that no longer has winter, or returning, or any spring but the one nailed permanently over our heads. We are devouring, by the trayful, a recipe whose entire reason for being is a season we have lost the ability to lose. I do not know whether that makes our appetite for it touching or troubling. Possibly it is the most truthful thing the region has done all year. We have tasted what we are missing, decided we want more of it, and stripped the ridge bare trying to get it. Eat the cake. It is wonderful. Just do not pretend, while you eat it, that you do not know what it is about.

Topaz Toepads reviews the food and tables of Wexamour for the Vaelthir section. He accepts no free meals, on principle, and one slice of this cake, on grounds he declines to defend. Letters and dinner invitations may be sent by owl.