Christmas means plenty of gingerbread – gingerbread men, gingerbread house… I’ve always wanted to make a gingerbread cake, as I like the flavours in there more so than Christmas pudding, and wanted a scrumptious gingerbread-like dessert to wrap up Christmas dinner.

This year, I found the favourite old fashioned gingerbread recipe and decided to adapt it by reducing the sweetness and doubling the spice, and also adding a layer of mascarpone cream icing on top. The result? Delicious! The cream and gingerbread taste worked really well together!

Some of the steps are slightly different as I find it easier and quicker to mix things in different orders. Also, I’ve used a round tin instead of the 9″ square one in the original recipe, and have used some crystalised ginger to decorate the cake. The baking time was still 1 hour (I checked at 55mins and it was still a tad undone).

Ingredients
100g of butter
75g of white caster sugar
275g of golden syrup
1 egg
300g of all purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp of baking soda
2 tsps of ground cinnamon
2 tsps of ground ginger
1 tsp of ground cloves
1/2 tsp of salt
200ml of hot water (a mix of 50% cold, 50% boiled)

For the “icing”
1/2 cup of whipping cream
1o0g of mascarpone
1 tsp of vanilla extract
1 1/2 tbsps of icing sugar
Crystalised ginger (optional, for decoration)

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.

Step 2: Soften the butter and then beat the sugar into the butter, followed by the golden syrup and the egg.

Step 3: In a separate large mixing bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger, cloves and salt. Stir thoroughly and sift if lumpy.

Step 4: Pour the syrup mix into the flour and stir thoroughly. Don’t worry, lumps will not form in the end as the final mix will be quite watery.

Step 5: Slowly pour in the hot water and mix thoroughly again until you form a smooth paste.

Step 6: Pour into an oiled cake tin and pop it into the preheated oven. Bake for 1 hour.

Once done, leave to cool thoroughly before decorating…

Icing step 1: Beat the whipped cream until peaks form (takes about 3 minutes of intense hand beating).

Icing step 2: Mix together the mascapone, vanilla and icing sugar and beat these into the whipped cream, until peaks form.

Now it’s ready to spoon onto the cake! I decided to decorate it by leaving a gingerbread man shape un-iced in the middle and added a ring of crystalised ginger around it. What do you think?