A devilishly dark and sticky cake, made all the better with a considerable amount of crystallised ginger for a bit of fiery kick. It’s even better the day after baking, if you can hold off eating it all at once!
I love ginger. It’s one of those things that appear on our shopping list each week without fail. We cook a lot of asian inspired food, and it’s a quick and guaranteed way of packing a punch quickly. However, despite having it around, I’d never really thought before about using it as a baking ingredient. Having researched ways to use ginger, I found a recipe for a caramel and ginger cake. It sounded too good not to try, and despite being a little bit dubious, I’m so glad I did! It was just delicious.
This cake is simple to make, with an amazing quick caramel sauce used as both an ingredient in the sponge and a topping. I will definitely be using this caramel sauce again! It gave the sponge a real depth of flavour that can be hard to achieve in quite a plainly flavoured sponge, and the extra wet ingredients kept the it perfectly moist. Then the ginger – crystallised ginger in this case – is roughly chopped and just folded into the cake batter. It is the ginger flavour that benefits from being left an extra day. It wasn’t necessarily stronger, just more consistent across the cake, and the ginger chunks in the sponge had almost melted away.
Although you could definitely tell this was no diet cake, it’s a treat I can’t wait to have again. For a simple recipe, it packs quite the flavour-filled punch!
