Monday 24 May 2010

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.

6 comments:

Lucie said...

This looks lovely Suelle - I love the glace. Looks so tasty! Lucie x

Celia @ Fig Jam and Lime Cordial said...

That looks most elegant, Suelle! I'm caffeine intolerant - I wonder if I could substitute ground cacao nibs...hmmm...

Suelle said...

Celia - I've never used cacao nibs. Can you grind them to a coarse powder, as with coffee, or are they too hard? If you can grind them I think they could work well with ginger and some nuts.

Celia @ Fig Jam and Lime Cordial said...

Suelle, thanks - I'll give it a go!

Choclette said...

Agh, thanks Suelle, it's useful to know about the coffee grounds. I'm not a coffee fan but I have a friend who wants to make a coffee cake which uses grounds, but hasn't quite got the confidence to do so as she thought it would be gritty.

Suelle said...

Choclette - Dan Lepard has written an interesting piece on using coffee in baking on his website:
http://www.danlepard.com/blogs/2010/05/2534/coffee-love/

My ground coffee is for a filter machine - it might be finer than coffee ground for other types of brewing. I have to say that the flavour of ground coffee in cakes is nothing like the flavour we know, and perhaps expect, from instant coffee.