Thursday 23 February 2012

The Best Gingerbread Yet!

When I cook a new recipe which I'm not entirely happy about, I often speculate as to what it needs to make it better, but rarely get round to going back and trying the recipe again with the 'improvements'. This time I have gone back to a gingerbread recipe which I tried a couple of months ago, and made the changes that I suggested at the time.

I used half black treacle and half golden syrup, to reduce the bitterness, and increased the ground ginger from 1 teaspoon to three. I also used sunflower oil rather than olive oil, as I thought the expense of olive oil was wasted on such a strong flavoured cake.

For my future reference, I'm going to list the metric ingredients:

350g plain flour
1 1/2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
3 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon salt
90mls (6 tablespoons) sunflower oil
150g caster sugar
1 egg
250mls of equal parts golden syrup and black treacle and 250mls hot water (mixed together in a measuring jug).

It's another simple cake to mix - the spices are mixed into the flour, and the oil, sugar and egg are whisked together in a bowl. Portions of the flour mixture and the diluted syrups are then mixed alternately into the egg mixture, without overmixing. Baking takes 50-55 minutes at 170C, in an 8"(20cm) deep square tin.

The changes were exactly what is needed. I now have a recipe for an 'old-fashioned' gingerbread which uses oil instead of butter. It's dark and delicious and has enough ginger to produce a tingle on the tongue. It also has the right sort of surface - one that gets stickier with time. I hesitate to say it's perfect, as the batter is too wet to take any additions such as chopped stem ginger - I'm sure they would sink - but it's the best low-saturated fat gingerbread I've made so far!

5 comments:

Caroline said...

Looks pretty perfect to me, and your description of the sticky top sounds utterly delicious. Good to know your suggested changes made it much closer to your goal of perfection. I do love a good gingerbread.

Phil in the Kitchen said...

Great stuff - too much black treacle is a little hard to take. There are plenty of recipes that I intend to go back to but never quite find the time. This proves it's worthwhile.

MissCakeBaker said...

Well done for perfecting it - it looks delicious.

celia said...

Good for you, Suelle, there's nothing quite as satisfying as perfecting a recipe..

hemalata said...

Yummy gingerbread, looks so soft n moist.