Baking Tuesday Returns

Tues 01 August 2006

For a while, Tuesday was known as 'Baking Tuesday' at home. This was because I would come home from work and make biscuits or cakes to take into work. I got out of the habit - a couple of rather elaborate creations wore me out, I went out, the excuses just started to flow.

However, my housemate has been on about a ginger cake for quite a while (yes, I know, it's only taken a month of nagging!), so I finally dug out the cake tin and set to. Much to their disgust, my workmates have missed out on this one, though I've promised to produce another solely for them and soon!

This was made up (from various base cake recipes) to cater for what was available as I couldn't be bothered going to the supermarket.

Take 100g of unsalted butter and melt (in a pan) with 100g muscovado sugar and 100mL of golden syrup. Once melted, remove from the stove and stir in a teaspoon of ground ginger, a splash of rum and mix in one egg. At this point I also added about 50g of chopped glace ginger.

Mix 200g plain flour with 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda and add the butter mixture. Mix in approximately 50mL of milk. It makes quite a runny mixture.

Pour into a baking paper lined loaf tin and bake in an oven preheated to 150C for approximately an hour (yes, it really does take this long!) - or until firm and a skewer comes out cleanly.

If you are going to use the glace ginger and a food processor I'd add the glace ginger last, and preferably stir in by hand. I was hoping for little pieces of ginger actually in the cake but the Magimix was FAR too efficient for that. If you don't like your ginger cake too gingery you may choose to omit the glace ginger altogether - or you could even incorporate it into some icing. I found that mixing the glace ginger into the warm, melted butter mix meant that it did separate out nicely - if the pieces hadn't been processed I'm sure I would have ended up with a good, even distribution of them through my cake.


Either way - the cake is moist, dense and quite caramelly on top (you'd hope so with all that sugary stuff in it!). It lasted less than two days!

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