Gingerbread

[snowwhite]

A little while ago I made some gingerbread using the recipe from How to be a Domestic Goddess, which I've used lots of times before EXCEPT my scales seemed to be malfunctioning, and it seemed to me I had too much of the melted liquid ingredients (butter, sugar, golden syrup, treacle) in the pan for the requisite amount of flour (my first attempt at measuring out flour confirmed my suspicion about the scales)...

Anyway, I poured some of the liquid into a different pan and proceeded (and made another batch of non-standard cake with the extra later) AND the result was actually better, imo, than the original recipe - less liquid, so denser and stickier. Now, obviously I can't entirely recreate my improvisation, BUT how would any of you keen bakers adapt the recipe to make it denser and stickier than the original?

I'm thinking cutting down the milk for a start, and possibly taking out some of the butter as well? It's a very liquid batter, so plenty of scope for reducing non-flour ingredients.

Original ingredients:
150g butter, 125g muscavado sugar, 200g golden syrup, 200g treacle, 2 tsp ginger, 1tsp cinnamon (all in pan and melted)

250ml milk, 2 eggs (added to melted ingredients with bicarb, dissolved in water)

300g plain flour.

[sophie]

I usually make gingerbread cookies.. the dough is quite dense and needs refrigeration before being rolled out. No milk in my dough. The cake version is (fuzzy memory here) pourable. But I don’t recall adding milk.

[snowwhite]

This is definitely cake, not biscuit/cookie. And it's normally a very liquid batter. The improvised version was still definitely liquid, so there's a lot of scope for reducing (say) the amount of milk.

[sprite]

This is the most recent cake I've made, and it's quite sticky. Maybe there's a ratio in there that will make sense?
Benjaminah Sweet potato ginger cake


Every once in a while, I read up on the chemistry involved and then I can tweak recipes to get the results I want, but then I forget.

[snowwhite]

I made a second recipe, (which was also good, and provided some food for thought about proportions of ingredients) and then created something which seems good to me...

I used 300g flour, 150g butter, 175g each GS and treacle, 100g sugar, 180ml milk (that was the biggest change) and two eggs. Spices and bicarb the same.

Can recommend adding lemon water icing - works well together.