Fluffy....
Thursday Pounce! I love scarves; I have maybe two drawers overflowing with scarves from vintage shops, Goodwill and Anthropologie. Scarves from Anthro can be a very expensive habit, so I’m trying to stalk my prey from a safe distance. On the other hand, this scarf is fairly affordable, by scarf standards. I just want to wrap it around me and up over my nose and mouth to keep the cold at bay. ♣Note to self: Add scarf gallery of current scarf collection, since I clearly take it for granted.
I promised I’d post my adventure with Bread & Honey’s Gingerbread Cake recipe, having gone on about it for long enough, so here it is:
8 Tbsp unsalted butter @ room temperature
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup boiling water (This gave me pause; I’d never met a recipe that asked me for this…)
2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp ground ginger
1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground cloves (Didn’t have this, so I substituted 1/4 tsp Cardamom & another 1/4 tsp cinnamon.)
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder
2/3 cup packed brown sugar
1 cup unsulfured molasses (I only had 1/3 cup molasses, even less than B&H and used 2/3 cup maple syrup…it made the cake sooo fluffy, and I suspect it made it lighter than it otherwise might have been.)
1 Tbsp. freshly grated ginger (I didn’t have this, but I’m thinking in the future I might add 1/4 cup crystalized ginger, like I use in my scones, to see what it does.)
2 large eggs, room temperature, lightly beaten
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour a 9″ round spring form pan and set aside. (B&H uses 9×13 cake pan, but I’m a rebel with a new spring form pan to break in, so there!
In a bowl, combine boiling water and baking soda; set aside. (Why?? Can anyone tell me?) Sift together flour, ground spices, salt, and baking powder; set aside.
Cream butter until light, and add brown sugar, beating until fluffy. Add eggs*, molasses and grated ginger/crystalized ginger, baking-soda mixture, and flour mixture. *B&H’s recipe calls for me to beat in eggs after I add everything including the flour mixture, which made no sense to me in the context of my baking experience…and this was one thing too many, so I added the eggs when I felt I normally would. Someday when I feel conformative, maybe I’ll add the eggs later. But not today.)
Pour batter into prepared pan; bake until a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean, 30 to 35 minutes. Let cool on a wire rack. (For spring form pan, cool for ten minutes on wire rack, then remove coil.) Cut into wedges and dust with confectioners’ sugar. Do not do what my husband does and upend the powdered sugar bag onto the cake. It’s a waste of sugar… yes I said it, and the cake is just the right amount of sweet on it’s own. It hardly needs it, especially if it has crystalized ginger in it.
I really love Bread & Honey’s blog; there’s something about her aesthetic and baking ethos that really appeals to me. I have tried a number of her recipes and found them all to well worth trying and repeating, many times. She also makes pretty awesome 10 Dollar Drawings, some of which I really want as a tattoo:
I Love Bees!
♥ Momo