The other day I spent quite a pleasant hour or two making one of my favourite cakes - the Ginger Root cake from Dan Lepard's Short and Sweet. It's ludicrously simple, which is good considering how easily I am led astray by recipes, and the end result is so delicious. It also only gets better with time, as the ginger flavours mature and gain a whole lot of warm spice. The premise of this cake is a marriage between the density of the "root" - Lepard suggests you use parsnips, turnips or swedes, but since all of these are winter vegetables and are rarer than gold here in sydney at the moment I used carrot and it's just as good - and the hit of ginger. I think that carrots work so well in baked goods (need I remind you of my, and the rest of the world it seems, obsession with the carrot cake from the Rose Bakery?). Another cautionary note - this recipe calls for the use of "stem ginger". I'm not really sure what that is, but the few times that I've made this cake I've used "natural ginger" which is like a crystallised ginger. The recipe asks for 4 nuggets of stem ginger - I normally add about 8 or 10 large-ish pieces of crystallised ginger, roughly chopped. And a sprinkle of cinnamon has never gone amiss with this cake. Okay, enough of that. You can get the recipe here.
This cake is so good, almost indecently, inappropriately good with this lemon icing. It's basically just icing sugar and lemon juice with a tiny bit of lemon zest added in. I'm not too sure of the ratios, but basically the icing should be thick enough that it will hold it's pattern across the top of the cake. The icing is so sharp and the cake has such a warm spice to it that it's the perfect combination. Let me know if you give this cake a try. I guarantee you that it will brighten days! It's good like that.
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