Fresh Ginger Coffee Cake

I debated with myself for about 5 minutes over this recipe for Fresh Ginger Coffee Cake from Dan Lepard! I had all the ingredients except pistachio nuts - would it be too much of a cliché to use walnuts instead? Probably, but in the end, that wasn't enough of a problem to stop me making it.

Not surprisingly, another slightly unusual method, but one which produced a really light sponge using less eggs and fat than you'd expect for the amount of sugar and flour used. The only point to note about the recipe, is that I whisked the eggs and sugar as if making a fatless sponge - for about 5 minutes using an electric mixer - to give a thick, pale foam.

As I didn't want to use the cream cheese frosting suggested in the recipe, I added a simple glacé icing flavoured with instant coffee, in a drizzle pattern.

The flavour of both the ginger and coffee in the cake were quite subtle; I'm not sure I'd have guessed either of them if I hadn't known what was in the cake. Because of this, it didn't seem like another version of a coffee and walnut cake, except for the icing I used which gave a strong coffee flavour. After tasting, I decided that my icing was probably a mistake - a plain or lemon icing would have been nicer and more in keeping with the subtlety of the cake flavour.

I was a little worried that using ground coffee would give a gritty texture, but that worry was unfounded, although it did give an unusual speckled appearance! I think Dan's suggestion of adding some finely chopped glacé ginger would be good, so when I try this cake with pistachios, I will make that change too.