Saturday 24 December 2005

Eve dinner


Happy Yuletide! Today marked the day I made a perfect cake! Ginger Spice Cake, though the gingery taste wasn't as strong as my dad would have liked it, i felt it was just right. Tasty enough for the kids. No longer would this be called the adults-only cake. :) I used a Tyler Florence recipe but after studying other ginger cake recipes like that from joyofbaking.com, i made a few slight adjustments for my own liking. Honestly, this is really a very good cake. I served it with warm cranberry sauce and it went pretty well. But maybe the next time I make it, I'll wanna try it with a lemon icing instead.

Ingredients

2cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

3/4 tbs ground ginger

2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground cloves

1 egg

1/2 cup molasses, unrefined

1 cup caster sugar

1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted then cooled to nearly rtp

1 cup buttermilk (i used faux buttermilk which is 1 cup milk + 3/4tsp cream of tartar)

Directions

Preheat to 175dcelsius.

Put dry ingredients in a bowl and whisk together.

Beat egg, molasses, sugar and melted butter until thick. Sift dry ingredients and gradually mix it in in 3 batches, alternating with buttermilk. Beat for near 1 min after each addition and end the mixing with the dry ingredients not buttermilk.

Finally when done, pour into pan and bake for 35-40min.


Next comes the Cranberry Sauce. This needs to be served warm and can be microwaved right before serving if you have made this too early. This recipe was created by my own try-and-error and guess what? It was pretty damn amazing (to my surprise)!

And it's really simple too. I used 1 cup of frozen cranberries, washed and dried with a paper towel. Add 1 cup of water, 1/2 cup white sugar, 1/2 tsp cinnamon and some leftover blueberries from my previous blueberry cake and voila!

All this needs is for you to boil everything together, except the blueberries and cinnamon. Then reduce the heat to the smallest fire, so it heats nice and slow enough to simmer. Stir occasionally so that all the sugar crystals melt. The berries will start to burst. Add the cinnamon when it starts bursting. And wow, there's this amazing warm thick scent that wafts up. Indescribable. You can let this simmer for 10-20min, depending how fast your sauce started to boil. For me, I let it simmer around 12min which gave me time to get a bite to eat since I was skipping lunch. Finally, when it's done, remove from heat. Give it a stir and throw in the blueberries. I suggest keeping the blueberries to a minimum cause you want the cranberries to not be overpowered by the blueberries which are meant to reduce the twang and add a more defined colour to the sauce.


So, slice the cake up into wedges and serve with warm sauce! Perfect for our garden dinner after turkey, wine and salad! We ordered some mini mince pies from this British Pies place over at Swan Lake too. Forgot to upload the pic but gosh were they so yummily adorable! (O yea, found orange peppers for the salad from this Meidi-ya supermarket. amazing. they were as orange as carrots) Of course, it ended up with my sister spilling wine and flipping the bowl of water and floating candles and so everything had to be cleaned up. But what a way to welcome Christmas.
Merry Christmas everyone! Cheers!

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