Gingerbread Three Ways

You know those cold wet Saturdays, when you've done some chores then gone back to bed with a cup of tea and your recipe books, food magazines and a hot water bottle, and spent some delicious time dreaming up your next few kitchen projects? This was one of those Saturdays. Cold, wet, utterly foul.  Bed was the only place to be.

Well, until I lazily flipped a page and got a surge of inspiration that jolted me up and into the kitchen. That's what happened when I got to page 305 of Nigella's Kitchen and started reading the recipe for Guinness Gingerbread.

I just had to bake it. There are a few great things about this recipe. At the top of my list is no creaming butter and sugar, just melting, so butter out of the fridge is just fine. No cake mixer at all, in fact. It's only got two eggs, which for some reason makes it feel like health food. There's a whole heap of golden syrup in it, along with a good whack of dark muscovado sugar, which makes it super rich and dark. And then there's the novelty of baking with beer.

We don't keep Guinness in the house, but I did have a bottle of stout secreted in the pantry, on the ready for our next beef cheek or osso bucco event.

It was pretty cool pouring stout into the cake mix and watching it foam all over the place.

There are three easy parts to this recipe: a melt and foam; flour and baking soda; dairy and eggs. Here's how it goes (and yes, I know it's an awful lot of cake mixture... more on that below).

MELT and STIR

• 150 gm butter
• 300 gm golden syrup
• 200 gm dark muscovado sugar (but any kind will do I'm sure)
• 2 tsp each ground ginger and ground cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp ground cloves
• Pour in 250 ml stout... which is quite handy because stout seems to come in 500ml bottles, so there's a little treat for the cook left over.

SIFT

• 300 gm flour
• 2 tsp baking soda

BEAT (with a wooden spoon)

• 2 eggs with 300 ml sour cream -- I used creme fraiche, because that's all I had lurking in the fridge, but I suspect yogurt or milk would be fine too...

Add the flour mix to the melted mix, stir thoroughly till most of the lumps are gone, then mix in the egg and dairy.

Viola, an alarming amount of gingerbread mixture now stares you in the face. I should have known not to expect modest quantities of cake mix from Nigella. Anyway, I don't have immodest cake tins, just modest ones, so I lined the biggest one with baking paper, poured in some of the mix, and popped into the oven at 170 and set the timer for 45 minutes.

Some of the left over mixture made its way into small souffle dishes and baked up as portable puddings for our lunch boxes.

And the rest of the mixture became gingerbread pikelets... which actually weren't that bad. A little flat and a little quick to burn, but very tasty with some butter and a dark rich coffee.

This gingerbread was just asking to be eaten with custard. I made Nigella's baked custard, which was mildly disappointing. It was a bit like a quiche that had lost not only its crust, but also its taste. Too eggy and wobbly for my liking. A pouring custard would have been better.

Anyway, the gingerbread is dense, spicy, and as warming as a hot water bottle in a cosy bed. Perfect for a disgusting day, and well worth getting up for.