Recipe – Gingerbread
About eighteen months ago, The Mrs discovered baking, and created some true wonders. Just recently, I've taken up the mantle of family baker - I find it really satisfying as a 'thing to do at the weekend'. Productive but in a pleasurable way that helps me chill after a week at work. I don't intend to start producing recipes on a regular basis, but I mentioned that I've recently added gingerbread to my repertoire, and someone asked about the recipe, so here it is. It's a little fiddly, but well worth it. Apologies to Americans that the ingredients are as they're called in the UK. I've provided imperial measurements as well as the metric I use (I've done exact conversions because I don't want to screw things up by rounding wrongly), but I don't know that everything has the same name.
Ingredients:
225g/7.9 ounces of self-raising flour
1 teaspoon each of bicarbonate of soda, ground mixed spice and ground cinnamon
1 tablespoon of ground ginger
115g/4.05 ounces of chilled unsalted butter, diced
115g/4.05 ounces of black treacle
115g/4.05 ounces of golden syrup
115g/4.05 ounces of dark brown muscovado sugar
275ml/1.16 cups of whole milk
1 beaten egg
Prepare a loaf tin by greasing it with butter and lining it with baking parchment and pre-heat the oven to 180°C/350°F
Method:
- Sift all the dry ingredients into a large bowl together.
- Add the diced butter and rub it together with your fingers until it all has the texture and look of breadcrumbs.
- Put the treacle and syrup in a pan and heat gently until it's melted and a mixed liquid, but don't let it overheat - it should be just warm.
- Put the milk and sugar in a different pan and warm and mix to dissolve the sugar completely and let it cool a little.
- Whisk the milk/sugar mix into the flour mix, then do the same with the syrup/treacle and finally the egg. Whisk everything together until fully combined and liquid.
- Pour into the loaf tin and bake for about 45 minutes until a skewer comes out clean. Leave it to cool completely before turning it out.
- Wrap it in foil and leave it until at least the following day to unwrap and eat. The flavour gets more intense over time.