Home › Dainty Dishes › A Simple Ginger Cake
A Simple Ginger Cake
A well-made ginger is a much better cake on certain occasions than a fruit cake, and is quite superior to any cheap, coarsely-made cake. So many German cooks excel in making delicious ginger breads. A recipe for this cake calls for two cupfuls of molasses, one cup three-quarters full of butter, a tablespoonful of ginger and the amount of boiling water poured over a teaspoonful of same soda. Stir in enough flour to make a batter as thick as for sponge cake. Pour the cake out in biscuit pans in sheets about half the depth of the pans. Bake the cake in a hot oven, protecting it at the top and bottom if there is any danger of it burning. When the cake is done lift it carefully out and let it remain in the tins until it is thoroughly cold. Ice it if you wish with the following icing: Stir two squares of unsweetened chocolate with five tablespoonfuls of sugar. Add three tablespoonfuls of boiling water, and stir the mixture over the fire for several minutes until it is smooth and glossy. Spread this icing on evenly while the cake is a little warm, and let the cake remain in the pan until cold. Then cut it into even squares, and when the icing is hard lift them out.
A molasses cake written in the loose, conversational style of a newspaper column — the flour is unmeasured and the soda liquid is genuinely garbled. Read the notes before you start measuring.
- The ambiguous line"The amount of boiling water poured over a teaspoonful of same soda" is a printer's muddle; no quantity of water is given anywhere. Other gingerbreads of the period dissolve the soda in a small quantity of boiling water, anything from a spoonful to a few, but the original text does not say so and it should not be presented as a conversion.
- Flour by feel, not by cupNo flour quantity appears — you are told only to make a batter as thick as sponge cake, meaning one that ribbons thickly off the spoon rather than pours. With two cups of molasses and a scant cup of butter, that lands somewhere near four cups of flour, but add it gradually and stop at the consistency.
- "One cup three-quarters full of butter"That is three-quarters of a cup, or 1 1/2 sticks (about 170 g). Melt or soften it; cold butter will not beat into molasses.
- Hot ovenA hot oven is usually reckoned somewhere around 400-425F. Molasses scorches readily, so err toward 375-400F for a thin sheet and watch the edges.
- Protecting top and bottomIn a coal range this meant sliding a second pan underneath and laying paper over the surface. In a modern oven, use a light-coloured pan, set the rack in the middle, and tent loosely with foil if the top darkens before the centre sets.
- Biscuit pansSheet pans with a shallow rim — a quarter-sheet or a 9x13 works. Filling them half deep gives a thin layer, well under an inch depending on the pan, which bakes in about 20-25 minutes; test with a skewer.
- Squares of chocolateA square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so two squares is 2 oz. With only five tablespoons of sugar this glaze is assertively bitter by modern taste; it sets hard and thin, more a lacquer than a frosting.
- GingerA tablespoon of ground ginger in a cake this size is modest by today's standards, and old ground spice loses its heat quickly. Taste the batter and increase if yours is mild.
- YieldA 9x13 sheet cut into even squares gives 20-24 pieces. Cooling completely in the pan is not optional here — warm molasses cake tears, and the icing needs to harden before you lift the squares out.
Molasses gingerbread was the workhorse sweet of the nineteenth-century American kitchen: cheap, keeping well, and — in this version — needing no eggs, which made it a reliable thing to have in the tin. The writer's aside about German cooks reflects a real association — Lebkuchen and the honey-and-spice breads of Nuremberg and Aachen had long-established reputations, and German immigrant bakers were a visible presence in American cities by the 1890s, though the cake described here, leavened with soda and molasses, is thoroughly Anglo-American rather than German. The chocolate glaze is a further touch rather than a dating clue: unsweetened baking chocolate in one-ounce squares was a standard pantry item, and cookbooks of the period were happy to dress plain old cakes in it. The framing — better than a fruit cake, superior to cheap bought cake — is about respectability achieved without expense.