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Soft Sugar Gingerbread
2 eggs 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 3/4 cups flour 1 1/2 teaspoons ginger 2/3 cup thin cream Beat eggs until light, and add sugar gradually. Mix and sift dry ingredients, and add alternately with cream to first mixture. Turn into a buttered cake pan, and bake thirty minutes in a moderate oven.
A pale, cake-like gingerbread with no molasses in it at all — the sweetening is straight sugar, which is what the "sugar" in the title signals. It comes together in about ten minutes.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is generally taken as about 350-375F. Thirty minutes at that heat suits a shallow pan; test with a skewer at 25 minutes.
- Thin creamThis is what is now sold as light cream or single cream, roughly 18-20% fat. Half-and-half is the closest common substitute; heavy cream will make the crumb greasy unless thinned with a little milk.
- Pan sizeNo pan is specified. An 8-inch square or a 9-inch round gives a layer about an inch thick, which is what thirty minutes assumes. A loaf pan will still be raw in the middle at that time.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to 1 3/4 cups flour is generous by current practice, which runs about 1 to 1 1/4 teaspoons per cup. Two teaspoons will lift this batter and leaves less chemical aftertaste.
- Adding dry and wet alternatelyBegin and end with the flour mixture, and stir only until it disappears each time. The batter is thin and easy to overwork, which toughens it.
- GingerA teaspoon and a half of ground ginger is mild by modern palates, since there is no molasses to reinforce it. Ground ginger also fades in the jar; if yours is more than a year old, it is contributing colour rather than flavour.
- Yield and servingAn 8-inch pan cuts into nine to twelve squares. It is best the day it is baked, plain or with whipped cream, and it stales quickly because there is no molasses or honey to hold moisture.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks distinguished carefully among gingerbreads: hard gingerbread that was rolled and cut into crisp cakes, soft molasses gingerbread baked in a pan, and sugar gingerbread like this one, where white sugar and cream replace the dark syrup entirely. The result is nearer a spiced butter cake than the almost-black gingerbread most people picture, and molasses was the everyday cheap sweetener by comparison with refined white sugar and sweet cream.