Fochabers Gingerbread recipe

Gingerbread, cake, spicy cake, beer cake,

Food blogging is many things. It's likely that there are as many reasons to write a food blog as there are food bloggers. The question is "what are we recording"? which is not already recorded in our cookbooks collection.
great opportunity to display the bookcase I built to host my cookbooks
 My own answer is that we are recording stories we love, which show who we are  such as The Curious Tale of the Gingerbread, stories which connect dishes with their own history and ultimately stories which connect each one of us to the other.

In researching Gingerbread cakes, I came across this anecdote which is set in France, in the 19th century and shows how important gingerbread was then. Mr Thiers, one of the French Prime Ministers at the time, declared : " no man can call himself great until he gets his effigy made out of gingerbread" That important!

I wonder what their gingerbread tasted like in these days. Probably not like a Fochabers' as this recipe is quite unique with its beer, dried fruits and candied peel.
Fochabers Gingerbread
Ingredients
100g butter
100g sugar 
100g black treacle (molasses), slightly warmed 
2tsp ground ginger 
pinch of ground cloves  
2tsp mixed spice
1/2tsp cinnamon 
1 eggs  
250g plain flour  
50g currants  
50g sultanas 
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda   
25g mixed peel chopped 
150ml beer
Method
1- Preheat the oven to 160C/Gas 3/fan 140C. Grease a (2 pint) loaf tin. Using a food processor or an electric whisk, beat the butter together with the sugar and treacle until light and creamy. beat in the egg
2- Measure the bicarbonate of soda into the beer, stir it and set aside. Stir all the remaining ingredients into the creamed mixture. Stir the beer mixture then pour it into the cake mixture, beating well until thoroughly incorporated.
3- Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin and smooth the top. Bake in the center of the oven for 1 hour. When the cake is cooked, a skewer inserted into the middle should come out clean. Leave to cool in the tin for 20 minutes then turn out on to a cooling rack and leave until completely cold.

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