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Saturday, April 23, 2005
Sugar High Fridays: Fresh Gingerbread with Lemon Icing
For this month's Sugar High Friday, I happen to be on vacation in California. But did that stop me from baking? No! Of course not. This month's topic is molasses, and I am always up for a good pan of hot Hot HOT gingerbread, so I decided to revisit the tasty but poorly executed gingerbread that I made for this year's Ladies' Tea: Nigella Lawson's Fresh Gingerbread with Lemon Icing from How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking.
So, nothing terribly exciting to report here yet, as we went out to the Copenhagen Bakery in Burlingame after dinner, leaving the gingerbread untouched. Freaks! It'll be better tomorrow, though, anyway. But just so I don't forget, to this batch I added a little bit of coffee, some cayenne, some black pepper, some cloves, and some dried ginger (in addition to the fresh). I like my gingerbread hot, bitter, and kind of tarry. Also, we didn't have any brown sugar, so I used white sugar and even mo' 'lasses. Brer Rabbit brand, because I hate the label on Grandma's brand. There was a gorgeous bottle of sorghum syrup on the same shelf, and two styles of Lyle's Golden Syrup--canned and jarred--but I didn't bring my camera to Trag's. Sorry.
I mixed the batter very thoroughly this time, with a whisk, but there may still be some lumps in it. Probably the liquid should be added to the flour in two batches, or something. Here it is straight from the oven:
No, the cake was nothing special to make. What was special was the Mutant Lemons from the very prolific tree in KJ and DT's backyard. I chose these three representative specimens:
Walnut shown for scale. Note that the big one is about the size of a grapefruit. There was an even larger one on the tree, but I couldn't get to it. When I cut the mammoth lemon (lemmoth?) open, the inside was even weirder:
It's, like, sideways. I got half a cup of juice out of this sucker, without a reamer. Of course, right after I added a half cup of confectioners sugar to that and got soup, I realized that I had only been supposed to add a tablespoon of juice. So I started over, with new sugar, and put the leftover sweetened juice in the fridge for lemonade. I ended up making about 1.5 times the amount of icing given in the recipe, as the coating was again a little too sparse to be appetizing. The finished cake is very homemade-looking (note the vampire fang holes in the center where I brutalized it with a kebab skewer), but as I said, I expect it to taste fabulous tomorrow.
Later on, KJ was making drinks and cut up the carrot-shaped lemon for garnish. It turns out that one was hardly a lemon at all. Not one speck of pulp:
So, there you go. I will update once I've actually eaten a piece.
Update: Well, we ate about one-third of the cake yesterday around teatime and had another third at a picnic this afternoon. (We thought about eating some for breakfast but decided to save it for the picnic.)
Everyone declared it yummy, though one picnicgoer seemed to think it was more of a spice cake than a gingerbread, which I take to indicate that it contained too much ground cloves (entirely possible--I was freestyling) and not enough ginger. I'm fine with that; there is always room for more ginger. Maybe I'll double the amount next time.
The lump factor was negligible this time, but I'd still like to find a more trustworthy way of smoothly mixing the ingredients than just whisking the hell out of it and hoping for the best.
1:14 AM | 5 fancy new comments |
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also, may i have some gingerspicebread, please?
also, fyi, burlingame is home to the pez museum.
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Stellou: The lemmoth was pretty disturbing, yes. I was afraid it might try to talk. But my crystal ball tells me there may be some gingerbread in your future.
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