Let Us Eat Cake

[Seaworthy Lass]

Originally Posted by JPA Cate

However, since y'all like the ginger flavour, here is a recipe, that a friend of ours who is married to a retired admiral got from a friend of hers.....

Dutch Ginger Cake
1-3/4 c. plain flour 1 c. caster sugar
125 g. glace ginger, coarse chopped, =1/2 c. 1 egg, beaten
185 g. butter (3/4 c., US meas.), melted 30 g. blanched almonds (~1/2c.)
1 Tbsp. milk

Into the 8" baking pan, sift the flour and sugar, and add chopped ginger. Mix in the melted butter and egg. Press mixture into well greased tin. Brush top with a little milk, and decorate with the almonds. (I blanch my own for this, but one can buy them blanched to save time.)

Bake in a moderate oven, ~190 deg. C (~350 deg. F.) 30-35 min. Test for done with toothpick. Cut in wedges to serve.

My mouth is watering here .

This sounds like the recipe for a scrumptious 2cm high cake available only in December in Friesland bakeries. Ginger treats feature heavily there at Christmas particularly Speculaas and Kruidnoten, the tiny ginger biscuits that Sinterklaas’s helpers distribute to every child when he arrives by boat, and that they then leave in kid’s shoes for the three weeks prior to his name day. Powdered ginger is used extensively and ankle biters develop a taste for it at a very young age .

SWL

PS I looked up the difference between crystallised ginger (that I usually have a supply of on board to munch on) and glace ginger and stem ginger. Apparently they are cooked exactly the same way, so can be reasonably substituted in recipes.

[Seaworthy Lass]

This is the Gingerbread cake from a couple of posts back. I find recipes much more enticing when I can drool over the finished product .

I glazed the cake by drizzling over a couple of tablespoons of syrup from the jar of stem ginger.

[Wotname]

Originally Posted by Seaworthy Lass

This is the Gingerbread cake from a couple of posts back. I find recipes much more enticing when I can drool over the finished product .

I glazed the cake by drizzling over a couple of tablespoons of syrup from the jar of stem ginger.

Sweet cake knife but is it overkill?

[dfelsent]

Omg. I’m drooling.

[Seaworthy Lass]

Originally Posted by Wotname

Sweet cake knife but is it overkill?

Yep .
So much so that you only need to hover it over cake. The mere threat causes the cake to quake so much that it splits cleanly .

[Seaworthy Lass]

I am keen to try preserving a batch of stem ginger.
Has anyone done this? Any recipes or tips would be appreciated.

At the moment with the Refleks running a few hours a day for heat, I can cook without any thought of needing to be frugal with gas usage.

SWL

[Wotname]

Originally Posted by Seaworthy Lass

Yep .
So much so that you only need to hover it over cake. The mere threat causes the cake to quake so much that it splits cleanly .

A perfect example of overkill then

[Seaworthy Lass]

STEM GINGER

Preserving ginger turned out to be super easy, but extremely rewarding. The flavour is intense, much more so than the store bought version and well worth making for this reason alone. I suspect that commercial stem ginger is boiled with frequent changes of water to soften the bite and make it universally palatable. This was suggested in a few of the recipes I found, but it will wash the heat right out.

I read through all I could find online and this is amalgamation of several recipes with a little tweaking .

METHOD:
- Peel some young, fresh ginger root and slice it into medallions about 1cm thick.
- Weigh the peeled ginger and reserve the same weight in sugar.
- Cover the ginger with water and simmer until it can be pierced easily with a fork (30-60 minutes depending on the age and size of the pieces).
- Drain the liquid into a container.
- Combine ginger, sugar and enough reserved liquid to match the volume of sugar (ie 1 cup of liquid for each cup of sugar).
- Simmer, stirring frequently until the syrup reaches the consistency of runny honey (not critical).
- While hot, seal in warm, sterilised jars.

I used 460g of peeled ginger, 3 cups water for cooking and 460g sugar (a bit over 2 cups).
To minimise steam and “hovering time”, I brought the ginger and water to pressure in a pressure cooker then cooked it for about 20 min and let it sit an hour to continue cooking while it cooled. The ginger I had was unfortunately not young enough to be ideal, so it needed reasonable time to become “al dente”.
After adding sugar and stirring until it dissolved, I brought the pot to pressure again for a few minutes. The syrup wasn’t as thick as it should be, but still very good. It made the process easy.

I used the leftover reserved liquid (non sweetened) to make ginger infused tea. The syrup can be used in drinks, cakes, etc. The ginger itself is excellent in cakes and cookies.

SWL