Chocolate Ginger Cake

Making all of these cakes is giving me cake gut (a lot like beer gut, but made of cake). I really need some help disposing of these that don't involve me force-feeding my 'becoming reluctant' work colleagues. I think I have ruined everyone's appetite for homemade cake and I am met with looks of narrow-eyed suspicion whenever I have a Tupperware container on my desk. My next cake after this one will probably involve marshmallows. This may help my shameless enabling turn a corner without anyone realising it.

This cake was challenging. Again, the recipe writing has left a little to be desired, but I have fixed it below for everyone. I think I did the recipe wrong; I tossed the chopped up ginger, as well as the ground ginger, into the mix, before realising that the chopped up ginger was essentially a garnish. You may notice my photo below shows no such garnish on the icing. I had a small amount of ginger left over as I wanted something with which to style my food, and didn't want to chop it up. Surprisingly, even with the extra spice, it wasn't very gingery at all. Nor was it very chocolatey. If you make this cake yourself, I think you should feel free to double the cocoa and ginger. This is essentially a brown cake. with chocolate icing. I'm assuming it's tasty. I have to confess and say I haven't even tried this one yet (well, I've tried it while preparing it, but not yet since it's been cooked). I'm a bit tired of cake, and there have been quite a few this last week.

I've noticed many of these cakes call for quite a lot of butter or margarine. As we all know, butter tastes better than margarine and I've been surprised to see margarine so often in these recipes. I was going to make a point about living in a time when margarine was still a relatively new product, however it seems my history of margarine knowledge is a little lacking; it has, in fact, been around since 1869. Maybe it kept better, or was more economical? I'm using butter for all of this cooking, but will probably go and get my cholesterol tested soon...

On a positive note. I am a third of the way through the recipes I'd chosen to cook for this blog. I have about 40 more recipes to prepare, and then I'll be figuring out how to make this into a cookbook! The home stretch! 

Chocolate Ginger Cake

330g (2 cups) butter or margarine

1 cup sugar

1 tsp. ground ginger

1 tbsp. cocoa

1 cup hot water

1 egg

2 cups plain flour

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. bicarbonate of soda

2 tbsp. milk

Chocolate icing

1 tbsp. crystallised ginger, chopped finely

Preheat oven to 160°C. Grease and line a baking dish with paper.

Boil the ginger, butter, cocoa, sugar and hot water for five minutes, turn into a heatproof bowl and allow to cool. Dissolve the bicarbonate of soda in a little warm water and add it to the beaten egg and milk. Mix this through the cooled butter chocolate ginger mix, then sift the flour and baking powder into this, stirring well.

Cook for 50 minutes, then turn out to cool. When cold, ice with chocolate icing and sprinkle with chopped ginger.  

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For those of you who are not in Australia, please find here a selection of Measurement & Temperature Conversion Charts which should help with the accuracy of your own cooking.