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!

Highfield Blackberry Cake

This weekend I went to my first Clandestine Cake Club meeting. I literally cannot think of a better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than chatting to new people over eight or so slices of cake. The premise is that you meet up every two months or so and everyone brings a cake relating to that meeting’s particular theme – and then everyone just sits around eating it and talking about cake. It’s not a competition, it’s just cake. Bloody lovely, I say.

The theme for this meeting was ‘Herts Delight’ where you had to make a cake using local ingredients from around Hertfordshire. My mum has been taking me on walks around Highfield all summer with enormous plastic bags, and we now have a freezer full of blackberries. Therefore it made a lot of sense to us to make a blackberry cake. Now I know this cake may not be the prettiest, but give it a chance, because it tastes absolutely gorgeous, especially with a dollop of cream or ice-cream.

Ingredients

5oz unsalted butter, softened

5oz caster sugar

5oz ground almonds

5oz self-raising flour

1 egg

1tsp ground cinnamon

2tsps vanilla extract

8oz frozen blackberries

Icing sugar, for dusting

Preheat the oven to 180⁰C, and prepare a 9 inch round tin either by greasing or with parchment.

Frozen blackberries work best for this recipe because they hold their shape better. To make the batter combine all of the ingredients, except for the blackberries, in a large mixing bowl. If you’re using real butter instead of something like stork then beat the butter and sugar together first. The batter should be quite thick, almost like a biscuit dough texture.

Halve the mixture. Use your hands to flatten balls of the batter to cover the entire base of the tin using one half of the mixture.

Scatter the blackberries on top, leaving a rim free all around the edge.

Flatten the remaining mixture and place carefully on top, sealing the edges.

Bake in the oven for one hour or until golden brown and cooked throughout. Leave to cool on a wire rack.

When you’re ready to serve, dust the top of the cake with icing sugar and a little cinnamon.

There were a few other blackberry cakes at the meeting, as well as a couple of Hertfordshire honey cake, two chocolate cakes and my particular favourite: A pear and mincemeat cake. I will definitely be making this for us at home soon.

The best thing about the meeting is all the cake you get to take home!

For more information on the Clandestine Cake Club or to find a club near you visit this website.