Gingerbread Cake

Gingerbread cake Well, time to make use of the ginger and lemon from the Sunday market, and of course, the Manuka honey!! I found a recipe of gingerbread cake at this site, RoseWave Recipes. 　　 There were some other gingerbread cake recipes, but the lovely design of this site was too attractive as well as the recipe itself. The only problem was that I didn’t have any crystallized ginger at home. Actually I have never seen such a thing around here. But I didn’t want to give up this recipe, so I decided to go for a rather risky experiment. Now, the reason why I wanted to bake a gingerbread cake was to try the Manuka honey for baking, so I was definitely going to use the Manuka honey instead of the molasses. Other changes: I decided to omit crystallized ginger and use more fresh ginger to compensate for that, and add some grated lemon rind in the cake. With this many changes, the taste could be completely different from the original recipe, I thought. To stay on a safe side, I reduced the amount of each ingredient to one-third of the original amount to bake a small cake. The only exception was minced fresh ginger root --- I doubled the original amount. This kind of experiment is so thrilling, don’t you think? The waiting time after putting the batter in the oven seemed like forever, but finally, the cake was done. I knew I was supposed to wait until it cooled, but I couldn’t help cutting off a tiny piece of the warm cake and taking a bite right away. It was just so sweet, without much of the taste of ginger or lemon rind. Then I thought ... maybe lemon sauce with butter and egg yolk could be too much with this cake which is already so sweet? Should I make something lighter? Something like…. Lemon yogurt sauce? So, time for another struggle. I mixed yogurt, a little sugar, lemon juice, sour cream and whipping cream, adding a bit of this and then a bit of that, tasting after each addition. Still it looked too thick, so I ended up adding some milk to make the sauce runny and smooth. The result of the experiment? Thumb up! :D After the cake cooled down, the flavor of the ginger and lemon got stronger, and the sweetness got somewhat milder. To my relief, the cake tasted good with the sauce, though I wasn’t sure if that was the best match. Later I found on the net that I could make something similar to crystallized ginger at home. Next time, after I make some home-made crystallized ginger, I’ll try this recipe again following the recipe with no changes this time, and also try the lemon sauce, too. ----- Exciting! -----