Friday 21 November 2008

Its never to early..

To be festive!

ginger cake 008

I saw this cake in the Observer Food Monthly magazine (it is a Nigel Slater recipe) and made it because I am feeling extremely excited about Christmas and this looked like a perfect early festive cake!

The cake smelt amazing whilst cooking because of the cinnamon and ginger, and looks lovely once its done. It only took 25 minutes to cook and I had the oven on quite low. Finally I spread the large amount of big pillowy Clementine icing on top and it was perfect! Once I had the icing on I popped it all in the fridge so the icing could set a bit and make it a bit easier to cut.

ginger cake 003 (My cake ingredients waiting to be turned into something delicious!)

A note about this icing: in the recipe it said 300ml of cream cheese, and of course on the cream cheese tub it is measured in grams. I put the whole tub of 200g of Philadelphia in and I was happy, but you might need more if you want it even thicker or less if you prefer it thinner.

I made quite a few substitutions in this recipe, not because I didn't think they would work but simply because I didn’t have the ingredients in. The main one was not including the diced ginger or ginger syrup. This made the cinnamon more prominent – not a bad thing in my eyes (or taste buds!) Then I used plain brown sugar instead of muscovado, which meant the cake wasn’t such a dark treacly colour. Finally, I used raisins instead of sultanas!

Maybe in future I would try with the ginger syrup etc. to get a much stronger ginger taste, or even go the other way and add extra clementine to the cake itself to make it extra fruity. Parts of the method for making this cake were similar to my last recipe. One last complaint is it uses lots of bowls, mixers, saucepans and spoons! Here is the link to the recipe for the cake! :)

(The finished cake, with the zest of one more clementine on top!)

ginger cake 012

3 comments:

Steph said...

Lucy, you're right.. it's never too early for festive desserts! I can't wait to bake cookies.. I can't even decide what to bake, everything?!? I like the clemintine zest in the frosting, it makes it so pretty and yummy!

Marie Rayner said...

Fabulous looking cake Lucy!! It's NEVER too early to be baking Christmas goodies. I want to bake this cake NOW! :-)

Anonymous said...

Fabulous cake Lucy, I saw this in the Observer too and can't wait to get round to making it.