How to Make Spicy Gingerbread (RECIPE)

My first memory of gingerbread: eating brunch in the West Village when we lived in New York City. I don’t remember what else we ate or the name of the spot, but I remember the setting. A red rooster painted on the steamy window greeted us as we walked in from the snowy cold to meet two friends. A crush of people were smashed together at tiny tables, giving us that sensation of eating in intimate proximity with strangers that’s so familiar in Manhattan. At 2:00 p.m., hunger rumbled in the belly I hadn’t fed since 9:30 the night before.

Someone suggested ordering the gingerbread appetizer to share. The waitress placed a blunt white plate on the table, covered almost entirely with a thick, fresh-from-the-oven slice of gingerbread. The scent of its spices wafted into our nostrils. It was deeply hued, festooned with a lopsided cap of whipped cream. A moist, cakey inside was enveloped in a faintly crispy crust. That first bite turned me into a gingerbread lover.

I made my first gingerbread three years ago. As you may have read about in my last post here about my relationship with baking, that first gingerbread came out a bit burned. Since then, I’ve tried other recipes and taken full advantage of my oven thermometer to regulate heat. Baking our own gingerbread has become a nascent holiday tradition, something I make every December before we join the traveling hordes flying to relatives’ for Christmas.

Following is the recipe my husband and I like best so far. Enjoy!

············

SPICY GINGERBREAD

adapted from the Joy of Cooking recipe

Yields: 1 9-inch round cake or 2 loaves

Planning Notes: You can make this a day in advance of serving and keep, covered tightly, on the counter.

Your gingerbread ingredients

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

1 1/2 teaspoons dried ground ginger

1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon allspice

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup hot water

1/4 cup dark molasses (such as blackstrap)

1/4 cup maple syrup

1/2 cup honey

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, melted and cooled

1 large egg

1/2 cup sugar

4 tablespoons finely chopped crystallized ginger

Cooking Instructions

1 — Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line bottom of baking pan(s) with parchment paper.

2 — Sift the flour into a large bowl. Add the soda, ginger, cinnamon, allspice and salt and whisk together thoroughly.

Your dry ingredients

3 — Put the hot water in a small bowl or 2-cup glass measuring cup. Add molasses, maple syrup and honey and whisk together thoroughly.

Your liquid ingredients

4 — Put butter and sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Whisk on low speed until butter and sugar are combined.

5 — Break egg into small bowl; make sure the egg is good and there aren’t any shell shards. Slip the egg into the stand mixer bowl; whisk on low speed until combined with butter and sugar.

6 — Add half of dry ingredients to stand mixer bowl. Whisk on low speed until flour is incorporated, then whisk on medium speed to fully combine.

7 — Add half of water-molasses-syrup-honey liquid to stand mixer bowl. Whisk on low speed until incorporated, then whisk on medium speed to fully combine.

8 — Repeat steps 5 and 6 with remaining dry ingredients then liquid.

9 — Remove bowl from stand mixer. Stir in chopped ginger with a rubber spatula (which you can use to scrape the batter out of the bowl into the pan).

Your chopped crystallized ginger

10 — Pour batter (which will be fairly thin and may have some bubbles — don’t worry about it) into prepared pan(s). Bake until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. If you’re using 1 9-inch round pan, it’ll take about 45 minutes (may take up to an hour). If you’re using 2 loaf pans, it’ll take about 35 minutes (may take up to 45). Cool 10 minutes in the pan on top of a rack before digging in!

Your batter ready to be baked

Serving Notes

Serve warm, dusted with powdered sugar or capped with a dollop of fresh whipped cream.

Your gingerbread dusted with powdered sugar

Notes on the Recipe

We like a spicy cake and love the bits of crystallized ginger. If you want a milder cake, cut the amount of ginger, cinnamon and allspice in half. If you don’t like spicy, chewy bits of ginger in your cake, you can omit those.

The type of honey you use will affect the flavor. If you want neutral sweetness, stick to a plain clover honey. If you like a stronger, more complex honey, by all means, use it.

Finally, you don’t need to use a stand mixer; it’s just easier and faster. If you don’t have a stand mixer, you can use a hand mixer or a plain old whisk and bowl.

Making Baking My Own By Teaching Another

I never used to like baking. When I lived in Japan my first year out of college, I had no oven, so it wasn’t even an option (although my 85-year-old great-aunt “baked” apple turnovers wrapped in foil in her microwave, sending out a shower of sparks, much to her son’s chagrin). When I tried baking banana bread at the age of 23, it came out blackened on all sides. Seven years later, nearly recovered from that incident, I tried making a tray of chocolate chip cookies, but they too came out charred. These were outcomes that I attributed to my complete inability to bake.

But most of all, baking seemed restrictive. I enjoyed cooking because you could improvise, but I saw baking as an activity where you had to follow directions exactly lest you end up with a disaster. So I stowed away the one loaf pan I owned, and for years, we used the cookie sheet only to heat up leftover pizza.

Then, due in part to a desire to eat better by making more food from scratch, a glimmer of interest in baking emerged. I started out slowly, with cookies. (Click here for my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe.)

Favorite chocolate chip cookies

Those turned out decently, so then I got excited about trying more. And, I got an oven thermometer. When I learned that our oven runs 25 degrees hot, I realized I probably shouldn’t have been so judgmental about my prior baking snafus.

Soon, my husband would come home from work to find me dusted in flour, a big bowl of apples from our backyard tree sitting in sugar to be made into a cake…

Apples melting into sugar

…a new pie made with that week’s freshest fruit…

Pluot tart

…and plates of cubed butter chilling in the freezer, to be combined with flour and water into the latest pie crust recipe I’d read, intent on finding our favorite.

Butter!

The old adage goes that if you can teach it, you must know it. So, this past weekend, I did a one-eighty on baking: I went from burning everything I baked to teaching someone else how to create confections.

My friend, E, wanted homemade goodies for his holiday party. He’s a talented guy, able to do anything he sets his mind to, including things others deem impossible. So even though the only implements I found in his kitchen drawers were a screwdriver set and an air pistol, I had faith he could bake cookies.

As I was coaching E to make chocolate chip cookies, snickerdoodles and gingerbread, it suddenly hit me how much I’d learned about baking, despite having intensely disliked it just a year ago.

E baking

I now know to sift flour to incorporate air, evenly distribute baking soda and cream butter and sugar well to yield lighter, fluffier goods. (Baking soda reacts with your wet ingredients to create small air pockets, and creaming butter and sugar maximize air bubbles, all of which lead to “light and fluffy”; if you have a glob of soda, you’ll have a giant air hole).

I’ve been taught to break eggs one at a time into a small bowl separate from the dough or batter. It’s easier to fish out shell shards that way, and if you have a bad egg, you won’t ruin your batch.

E breaking eggs into a bowl

But the best lesson of all for me? You can improvise in baking. You can’t screw around with the science of it too much, but you can adjust spices, sugar volumes, even cooking times. By teaching E these recipes, I realized that I’d refined them to my liking each time I’d made them.

In other words, once you build a strong foundation, you can make it your own.

My hope is that this baking lesson was step one in E building a strong foundation; that he’ll move from eating every meal out to making some of his food at home. And I like to think that our afternoon of baking might be the foundation for creating a new tradition: having fun making good food together.

············

Tomorrow’s post: The gingerbread recipe — perfect for Christmas!

Using Your Creative Power: Homemade Holiday Gifts & Toffee (RECIPE)

“Why should we all use our creative power…? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold, and compassionate…” –Brenda Ueland

There’s something special about receiving a homemade gift for the holidays. It feels personal, in that good way. The gift itself, and the story that hopefully accompanies it, tell you something about the person giving it to you: his talent for baking, his family’s dedication to making the best limoncello, her thoughtfulness in remembering how much you love the smell of fresh pine when she hands you her home-made wreath.

I’d like to think that the joyful, alive energy that imbues people as they create that gift for you also gets passed from giver to receiver.

We all have a creative side. Perhaps, for example, you can (or want to) produce scrumptious candy, capture arresting photographs, craft creamy goat cheese, fashion delicate jewelry, cultivate Christmas cactus, or make the best, unexpectedly spiced popcorn anyone’s ever had.

Whatever your creative power (whether it’s something you’ve done all your life, you’ve just begun, or you’re interested in starting), is there a way for you to use it this month to give someone a distinctive gift and a tale about yourself?

By giving something homemade, you may also give yourself a gift: moments where, in flexing your creativity, you feel generous, joyful, lively, bold, and compassionate.

To inspire you, following are:

1 — A starting list of food- and garden-focused homemade gifts that we’ve received or given over the years

2 — An easy yet elegant molasses almond toffee recipe that you can make and bring to a holiday party or make a double batch of and wrap in shiny boxes or crinkly cellophane bags tied with shimmery ribbon to give away

············

Starting List of Food- and Gardening-Focused Homemade Gift Ideas

• Chocolates (toffee, truffles, peppermint bark…)
• Limoncello made with lemons from your backyard
• Preserved or pickled produce from your garden
• Tennessee Christmas cookie recipe accompanied by homemade cookie mix and a bottle of bourbon, from a Volunteer State native (just received this on Sunday; cannot wait to make these and eat ’em with bourbon!)
• Orchids you raised
• Sausages made with your old family recipe

············

MOLASSES ALMOND TOFFEE

adapted from the Tartine cookbook recipe

Yields: Approximately 1.5 pounds

Total Time: 45-60 minutes active plus time for toffee to harden

Planning Notes: When cooking, I like prepping as I go to save time. With candy-making, however, I recommend reading the recipe all the way through and measuring all ingredients beforehand because you need to work quickly once the sugar starts cooking. When cooking sugar, keep a small bowl of ice water nearby in case you burn yourself. I’d also get a candy/oil thermometer for this recipe.

Ingredients

2 cups almonds (you can do all of them sliced or 50/50 chopped/sliced)

1 cup granulated sugar

3/4 cup golden brown sugar

3 tablespoons water

1/2 cup unsalted butter

1 teaspoon blackstrap or other dark molasses (molasses has a slightly burnt, sour flavor; if you don’t like that taste, you can probably use corn syrup or rice syrup instead, though I haven’t tested the recipe with those)

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

5 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped into 1/4 or 1/2 inch pieces (I like 70%, but you can use a less bitter chocolate if you like your toffee sweeter)

Toffee mise en place

Cooking Instructions

1 — Line 13-by-18-inch baking sheet or pan with parchment paper or nonstick liner. Spread half of almonds over the bottom of the prepared pan (if you’re doing 50% chopped almonds, use the chopped ones here).

2 — Clip candy/oil thermometer onto a 2-quart, heavy saucepan, ensuring the tip is at least one inch above the bottom of the pan. Place butter in pan and melt over medium heat. (The size of the pan is important; you want it to be small enough in diameter so that the thermometer is submerged at least a couple of inches in the toffee mixture so you get an accurate reading.)

3 — As soon as butter is fully melted, add sugar and stir to combine fully. Then stir in water, molasses, and salt.

4 — Cook, stirring very occasionally, until the mixture registers 295 degrees Fahrenheit on a thermometer. This will take about 7-10 minutes, and the mixture will become a slightly dark caramel color (it’ll be darker than a regular caramel because of the molasses).

5 — Immediately remove from heat as soon as the thermometer registers 295. Stir in the vanilla and baking soda (the baking soda makes the toffee crunchy), ensuring the baking soda is thoroughly incorporated. Be careful; the soda will make the mixture bubble up.

6 — Pour the hot mixture evenly over the almonds in the prepared baking pan/sheet. Work quickly, as it’ll start to set up immediately. Use a lightly oiled rubber or metal spatula to spread out the toffee if necessary.

7 — When the toffee has cooled to the touch but is still warm, spread the chopped chocolate over it and let the toffee’s heat melt the chocolate. Smooth the chocolate with an offset spatula once it’s fully melted; you may need to spread bigger chunks to get them to melt.

Chocolate melting on warm toffee

8 — Sprinkle the remaining almonds over the top, pressing them gently into the chocolate with the open palm of your hand so they stick.

9 — Let cool and harden completely. Break into pieces. They’ll keep in an airtight container for several weeks, but don’t freeze.

Notes on the Recipe

• The original recipe calls for toasting the almonds in the oven at 325 degrees Fahrenheit for 7-10 minutes. I thought that toasted almonds, bittersweet chocolate, and the molasses combined to make a candy that was a tad too bitter, so I decided to reduce the bitterness by leaving the almonds untoasted.

• The original recipe also called for 1 3/4 cups of granulated sugar, but I like the mellower flavor of using some brown sugar.

• The first time I made this, I plopped the butter, sugar, water, molasses, and salt in the pot all at once (per the recipe). Because they started at all different temperatures, the sugar burned before the mixture reached 295 degrees Fahrenheit. Throwing out that batch was sad. That’s why I now melt the butter first, then mix in the sugar, then add the remaining stuff (thanks, candy-making-expert-mom-in-law, for that tip!).

Enjoy using your creative power this holiday!