This gingerbread cake has a great balance of spice and sweet and can be baked in a 9″ pan or in these cute little gingerbread house molds.
It’s time for another cake slice cake!! As usual, all four choices look great. But it is December and there is a gingerbread cake in the mix, so I just had to go that way.
Other than gingerbread cookies, I really hadn’t make much gingerbread before joining the group last year. I believe this is now my third version in a little over a year.
It is amazing how many different version there are and how different the flavor profile of each is.
If you didn’t check out World Class Cakes after last month’s bake, you are really missing out. The book is gorgeous and filled with the most beautiful cakes and sweets.
This gingerbread was no exception. It was baked in a 9″ square pan and had the most beautiful royal icing design on top.
I love doing royal icing on my gingerbread cookies, but I am certainly no artist. The idea of trying to do something that looked like anything on top of a plain cake was way to daunting for me.
So I broke out some help, in the form of my Nordic Ware Gingerbread House Duet Pan. The whole recipe didn’t fit in the pan, so if you have the same, you could really get 3 or possibly 4 houses from the recipe. I decided to just throw the rest in a 9″ round and got a thin cake in addition to the houses.
This recipe does make a nice, mild gingerbread. My three year old and I made it together and we found it a bit messy to add the warm milk at the end… though that could certainly be blamed on us.
We tend to be a bit messy when we bake together. It would certainly be worth making again.
Gingerbread Cakes
Equipment
Ingredients
- ¾ cup butter softened
- ¾ cup sugar
- 3 eggs
- 2 ¾ cups flour
- 1 ½ teaspoon baking soda
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1 ½ teaspoon ground ginger
- 1 ⅔ cups whole milk
- 3 Tablespoons dark corn syrup
- 3 Tablespoons molasses
- finely grated zest of a lemon
- Optional: royal icing lemon buttercream or powdered sugar
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 325°F and prepare your cake pan (a 9×9" square pan, 9" round or fun gingerbread molds) with butter and flour or spray with flour in it.
- Cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy, then beat in eggs one at a time.
- In a small bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and ginger. Mix the dry ingredients into the creamed butter.
- In a small pan warm the milk slightly and stir in the molasses and corn syrup until dissolved. Beat into the batter with lemon zest.
- Pour into prepared pans and bake for about 40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean.
- Allow to cool in the pan for 10 minutes, the turn onto a wire rack to cool completely.
- Decorate with powdered sugar, royal icing or lemon buttercream.