Chocolate Gingerbread Cake

I’ve not had that much time to bake recently, busy working and being an adult and all that lark, but it’s Christmas soon so I will be baking some festive things if it kills me! I made this cake for another Clandestine Cake Club meeting last weekend. The theme was ‘winter spice’ but being awkward I hate all things like fruit cake so I thought I’d make something chocolatey. I tried it first as a traybake, and then as a round cake and it works well as either. This cake is really tasty and feels quite Christmassy too.

Ingredients

180g butter

½ tsp ground cloves

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp ground ginger

½ tsp nutmeg

150g brown sugar

150g black treacle

150g golden syrup

1 1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda

250ml milk

2 eggs

280g plain flour

30g cocoa powder

150g milk chocolate, chopped

To Decorate

80g butter

4 tbsp cocoa powder

3 tsp fresh ginger juice or syrup

25ml lemon juice

180g icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 180⁰ and line your tin of choice. Just keep in mind if it’s a deeper tin then the cake will take longer to cook.

Melt the butter in a saucepan.

Add the spices, sugar, treacle and golden syrup and heat until the sugar dissolves.

Dissolve the bicarbonate of soda in a tbsp of the milk.

Lightly beat the eggs in a large mixing bowl.

Whisk in the butter mixture.

Add the bicarbonate of soda and the rest of the milk.

Sift in the cocoa powder and flour and gently fold in.

Stir through the roughly chopped chocolate.

Pour into your prepared tin and bake for 45mins-an hour or until the cake is springy to the touch and completely cooked through. Cool on a wire rack.

To make the icing, gently heat the butter in a bowl over a saucepan of simmering water.

Add the cocoa powder, ginger and lemon juice.

Sift in the icing sugar and whisk until dissolved and the icing is thick.

Ice the cake and leave it a good ten minutes to set. For my round cake I made the icing without adding the ginger and lemon, and instead added that to a simple white icing to decorate. It’s delicious either way!