It appears that my baking spirit animal is Gingerbread Jenn; I’d been thinking for some time about finding a biscuit recipe to make for James (a tea and biscuit addict who I live vicariously through, if I ate that many biscuits I’d weight six times as much as I do now). I wanted biscuits, not cookie though and then a recipe for Bourbons appeared in my feed, courtesy Jenn (of course) and within a couple of days they were made; I couldn’t resist any longer. Where we differ though is that Jenn put bourbon in her filling and I opted for brandy, less in keeping with the name but I’m a brandy girl.
golden syrup
Chocolate Gingerbread Cake
Continuing with my new found love of tray bakes, the next cake I tried from Cake Keeper Cakes was Chocolate Gingerbread. Push any milk chocolate, sickly, children’s party tray bake out of your head immediately, this cake is mature, classy and fiery. As I said in my post ‘Maple Gingerbread Cake’, this reminds me of one of my favourite series of books ‘The Gingerbread Cafe trilogy – Rebecca Raisin‘ (oh the life envy I have of Lily, one of the central characters, in fact I’m pretty sure this cake would have been one of Lily’s favourites, she too was classy and fiery).
I’m pretty excited to tweak this cake and swap the treacle for golden syrup, perhaps a little less black pepper in that one as golden syrup isn’t as intense as treacle (yes, you heard right, black pepper!), maybe some fresh ginger too or more coffee…
This one if definitely for the adults and chocoholics of a ginger persuasion (i.e. me), my mum was a huge fan of this cake.
Gingerbread Granola
I made this granola on Christmas Eve, as a treat and we’ve been having it at weekends, on stewed apples, ever since. It is a recipe courtesy of Gingerbread Jenn, if anyone knows how to make gingerbread granola, it will be her (the clue is in the name). This was decadent, delicious granola with a combination of so many things that I love, hazelnuts, dried cranberries, cinnamon, ginger, dark chocolate and honey. It is just incredible.
It was too delicious to wait to get a beautiful photograph of but it is shown in the picture above on top of some cinnamon and ginger stewed apples and blueberries; a pretty perfect combination.
Noisette 