Double Chocolate Ginger Cake

I found this recipe on a blog which is new to me - Coconut and Lime. I have a feeling this is a blog I'm going to be reading regularly - it's very clearly written and there are some great photos (often of stages within the recipe). As all the recipes are original, the cook/writer, Rachel Rappaport has asked that they aren't copied out onto other blogs, and I'm happy to comply with this request, as it's the way I usually write anyway. Here's the link to Double Chocolate Ginger Cake on her blog.

I usually convert cup measurements to weight before I cook, and did the same here. I use this conversion list on Recipes4us, although I generally use a conversion of around 120g for 1 cup of flour, rather than the 100g suggested in the list. I couldn't find a conversion for crystallised ginger, so used 100g, and I also used a 100g bar of 74% chocolate, roughly chopped, instead of a 1/2 cup of chocolate chips.

I only had the sugar coated crystallised ginger in stock, and chopped it with brief pulses in a mini-chopper to give randomly sized pieces. The processing made the ginger quite sticky, so I added a tablespoon of flour from the recipe weight, and worked it in with my fingers to make sure the ginger pieces were separated and well coated. The carton of buttermilk contained 285mls, which was a tablespoon or two short of what was needed. I had intended to add a little milk to compensate, but forgot when it came to making the cake - it didn't seem to have an adverse affect, the cake was still moist enough.

This is another recipe using oil instead of butter (I used sunflower oil), and this makes the mixing really simple - dry ingredients in one bowl, mix in all the wet ingredients, beat until smooth then stir in the lumpy ingredients. The batter fitted nicely into my 10-cup bundt tin and the cake baked in the time given in the recipe. It slipped out of the bundt tin easily - I don't know if this was a feature of the cake or whether I've got better at greasing and flouring the tin!

This was a very good cake - the crumb was moist and quite open, and a good chocolate flavour for a cake with only a little cocoa added to the batter. The pieces of ginger added a lovely flavour, although some of the larger pieces sank. In a bundt cake this doesn't matter too much, as the bottom becomes the top when the cake is presented, but I think I'll chop the ginger a little finer next time.

I finished the cake with a dusting of icing sugar, although a drizzle chocolate glacé icing would make the cake prettier for special occasions - it's certainly good enough for that!