Gingerbread

Thurs 9 Nov 2006

All my plans to eat healthily until Christmas have pretty much come to nowt, as I've been scoffing my way through cakes, biscuits, chocolates, pies, pizzas and so on. Bravely, I'd announced that Baking Tuesday would be on hold until 2007 ... my housemate's face fell, and I held out for a whole week and 2 days!

Yet again, it was Dan Lepard's fault ... the recipe for jammy gingerbread, which appeared in a Saturday Guardian, was just too tempting ...

Since this recipe contains both oats and wholemeal flour, it is also ostensibly healthy!

As usual, both recipe and method modified a little ...

Preheat oven to 180C.

Take 75g of unsalted butter and process with 125g of muscovado sugar and 100g of jam. I used raspberry jam, which I don't recommend unless you choose a jam without the pips in it. While the Magimix did a pretty good job of destroying most of them, every now and then the cake-y experience was spoiled by a rogue raspberry pip! Process until smooth and creamy and then add 1 egg and process until light, then add 1 tsp of allspice and 1 tsp of ground ginger.

Take 100g of fine oatmeal (or, 100g of rolled oats which you blitz until fine) and 100g of wholemeal flour, and add in 1 tsp of baking powder. Add this to the processor and follow with 150 mL of milk mixed with 100g of plain yoghurt. If you dump all the flour in at once, before adding the liquid then it will be quite stiff, so I did the oats first, then the milk, then the wholemeal flour, then the yoghurt. I'm sure the Magimix would have coped just fine if I'd just dumped it all in ...

I lined my roasting tin with tin foil and poured the cake mixture in, and into the oven. The mixture was very pale and really quite thin, so I was actually a little worried. The original recipe says to bake for 55-60 minutes. However, after about half an hour the kitchen was smelling good, and on inspection the cake was cooked. I used a slightly larger tin than the recipe specifies, so (as always) you really need to use your judgement. As long as that's NOT how hungry your housemate happens to be!!!


As soon as the cake was removed from the oven I dredged (very) generously with golden caster sugar and let it sit.

The first taste test came shortly afterwards. The cake, still warm, was served with cream and it was very good.


Subsequent taste tests took place on the weekend. Because of the jam, the cake stays nice and moist, and a bit of time allows the sugar to soak in, making it super sticky and rich. It's not a big ginger flavour, but you could beef up the spiciness by adding a pinch of cloves. I actually think a dash of cocoa wouldn't go astray either ... Regardless, the cake itself is very light and was a big hit!

tagged with: gingerbread

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