Gingerbread Wreath Cake

Blogs feature highly on my “to do” list these days, either for writing posts or reading other people’s. There are definitely not enough hours in the day to read or write all the posts I would like to, and one of the main drawbacks of a blog that features baking is that when I have the time to write I have nothing to write about and when I am busy baking I have no time to write! I clearly didn’t think that through properly…

I read so many posts with brilliant recipes and I fully intend to try the majority of them but rarely do I actually manage to get myself organised enough to do so. This cake, however, features in a blog post by Baking Joy and it looked so delicious, and so perfect for this time of year that I had to give it a go. And that has to be the definition of a good blog post!

All I needed was an excuse to make it and the perfect one materialised in the form of an end of term Coffee Morning.

I used a 9″ ring mould rather than a proper bundt tin and halved the recipe in Baking Joy’s post. I also used plain icing and ginger pieces to decorate. I think the shape and the decorations give the cake the look of a Christmas wreath and the spices and treacle give the cake the taste of Christmas gingerbread. It would also make a good dessert, particularly when still warm.

This is the half recipe quantity as I did it, which Joy adapted from a Lakeland recipe:

Ingredients

150g butter

125g soft brown sugar

90g treacle

150ml milk

2 eggs

225g plain flour

1 and a half teaspoons bicarbonate of soda

1 and a half teaspoons cinnamon

1 teaspoon ginger

1 teaspoon nutmeg

100g chopped prunes

Icing sugar

Water

Crystallised ginger

Method

Set the oven to 180ºC. Grease a 9″ ring tin.

Melt the butter, sugar and treacle in a saucepan, then add the milk. Allow to cool then beat in the egg.

Combine the flour, bicarbonate of soda and spices in a large mixing bowl then whisk in the butter mixture.

Stir in the chopped prunes and pour into the ring tin. Bake for around 40 minutes or until the cake is firm to the touch and a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.

Allow to cool for a while in the tin and then turn out onto a cooling rack.

To make the icing, mix some sieved icing sugar with a small amout of water to get a runny consistency. Drizzle it over the cake and decorate with chopped crystallised ginger.

Categories: Baking, Cakes, Desserts, Recipes

Tags: baking, bundt, cake, Christmas, dessert, fruit, ginger, icing, prunes, recipe, seasonal cooking, spices, wreath