I felt like baking this morning. I usually don’t care about anything but coffee, but this morning, after taking 130 pictures of birds and squirrels, I wanted something warm and sweet with my coffee. So I made gingerbread, which is one of the simplet breads I can bake. I also, coincidentally, took pictures of it, something I usually forget to do.
After looking at the yummy pictures, I’ll give you the recipe. I tend to overbake my breads and cakes because a little underbaking goes a very long way to ruining the cake, but a bit of overbaking doesn’t ruin it. Also, I like baking gingerbread in a loaf pan rather than a cake pan and I have found that using a loaf pan adds about 5 minutes to the baking time.
This is considered a spicy recipe, but I’ve never found it spicy. Maybe it’s me:
2-1/4 cups of white flour
2 (or 3 if you like it sweeter) tablespoons of sugar
1 heaping teaspoon baking powder (or soda – either will do)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup molasses
1 cup very hot water
2 eggs
1/2 stick of butter, melted (30 seconds in the microwave does it for me)
2 teaspoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
Beat the eggs with the sugar and melted butter. I used a regular eggbeater. Cleaning up the big mixer is too much work for Friday morning. Mix everything else together. You can use a mixer or a wooden spoon. It’s a bread, so you don’t want to overbeat it. Add the egg mixture and mix some until it looks … well … mixed.
Spray the inside of a loaf pan with oil or use a paper towel dipped in oil. You can skip this if you have a deep and sincere faith in the power of non-stick pans. I go with the oil, but hey, it’s your loaf. Put the batter in the pan.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit (177 degrees Celsius). Put the gingerbread in the oven and set the timer (I really believe in timers!) to 50 minutes. At about 30 minutes remaining, lower the temperature to 325 F (165 C). When the timer goes off, put the cake on a rack to cool. As soon as you can handle the pan without burning yourself, turn out the gingerbread and let it cook a little bit more. This is typically served with honey butter, but I’m fine with it with nothing but some good coffee.
If you use a cake pan, subtract five minutes off the baking time.
It tastes really good.
Categories: baking, Food, Gallery, Photography, Recipes
Coffee and gingerbread–and many pictures of birds–looks and reads wonderfully!
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I’m trying to write things that go well with morning coffee. There’s plenty of day left for horrible things to happen. The news won’t go away, but at least a few minutes of a good recipe and some pretty birds … I know I need it. So I figured maybe other people do too.
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I can smell the spices all the way here in Vermont! How delicious. Gingerbread is a memory from my childhood, and I make it for my family now, not often enough.
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I like it because I almost always have the ingredients for it in the house. I keep a lot of molasses in the house because it’s such a common baking ingredient. It’s also the “dark” part of pumpernickel bread. And the spices are simple spices that are used for so many dishes … so it’s one of the easiest things to bake. Lacking a bakery and the one in the grocery store is ridiculously expensive … I make simple desserts at home. For this little dish, they want $7.00. It probably (including electricity) costs me maybe $3. And it’s SO good with coffee 😀
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I think molasses is an underused ingredient. It adds so much depth of flavor, not just sweetness but a little of the bitter as well that balances the sweet. After all, where would brown sugar be without molasses?
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I just ate the LAST slice! So very delicious. Thank you, Marilyn. And its wonderful smell still lingers over the house.
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If we don’t run out of bananas, I’ll make banana bread 🙂
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It looks good. Do you think it would work with golden syrup instead of molasses, if not I can probably get treacle which i think is more or less the same but I always have golden syrup in the pantry. I have to make a batch of ginger biscuits this week so might be a good time to do something else gingery.
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I once made it with maple syrup. It will taste different, but I can’t see why it wouldn’t taste good. These are really pretty basic recipes. If you keep the proportions similar, I should think they’ll work with more or less any ingredients. With banana, walnuts, and raisins, it was almost fruitcake 🙂
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I can feel the calories right around my waist…but sure looks good.
Leslie
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It’s not terribly sweet. It’s also not bad for toasting. It definitely is a bread, NOT a cake.
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It’s sounds wonderful Marilyn…
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This looks heavenly!
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Smells really good, too.
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I think I caught a whiff, Marilyn:)
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I hope you sniffed with coffee 🙂
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Oh, definitely!
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Oh my goodness, Marilyn, that looks so good. I’ll have to give your recipe a go. Thanks for sharing it with us. 🙂
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You can play around with ingredients too. If you don’t have molasses, you can probably use any sweet syrup. It will taste a little different, but I’ve made it with maple syrup and it was delicious. Golden syrup? Why not? Add raisins? Sure. Nuts? Why not?
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Maple syrup sounds perfect, and I love a recipe you can play around with. 🙂
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