After ten straight days of temps exceeding 80°F… in January… I’ll admit we were getting quite spoiled.  Last Thursday it all changed and we had 4 days of rain that was very much needed.  The cooler temps made it psychologically much easier to make this week’s Tuesday With Dorie recipe – Fresh Ginger and Chocolate Gingerbread.   Prior to this I’d only had gingerbread as a cookie but this cake-like gem of a baked good covered in a thick layer of chocolate ganache icing turned out to be a real treat.   I made this on Sunday night, took it to work on Monday and returned home with an empty tray – my colleagues really enjoyed it! {continued…} 

I’ll be upfront and say this was one of the most fussy of recipes and more than once I thought I must have been crazy to have even started it.  In the end, however, the only real problem I had was with the icing… but I’ll get to that in a minute ;-)  

The recipe for the cake calls for three different kinds of ginger… fresh, ground and stem ginger in syrup. I could not find the stem ginger in syrup so I used some candied ginger instead.  Dorie’s recipe also calls for adding both melted chocolate and chopped chocolate to the cake batter.  Well, at the time I wasn’t feeling up to melting or chopping chocolate so I tossed in about 1/4 cup of mini chocolate chips and called it a day. 

After baking the cake and letting it cool it was time to make the icing… no way to avoid melting chocolate at that point ;-)  Well, somewhere along the line I misunderstood the part of the directions which said to add one tablespoon of strong coffee to the chocolate being melted.  Instead of using coffee I used instant coffee crystals and quite honestly I have absolutely no idea why.  My glaze was crunchy for obvious reasons so I thought I’d try and recover by adding a tablespoon of hot water and whisking the livin daylights out of it.  That seemed to make it a bit better but oh my word did it have a very strong coffee flavor.  At that point it was getting late and I figured I’d just move on to adding the powdered sugar but I was lazy and didn’t sift it and I had very small lumps of sugar that just would not dissolve no matter how much I whisked.  I went ahead and used it to glaze the cake hoping upon cooling it wouldn’t be so noticeable.  Uh… no, didn’t quite work out that way. The glaze was super thin and not at all smooth.  I ended up making the glaze again, this time omitting the coffee and powdered sugar entirely.  I poured it over the cake so that it had two layers of chocolate and at that point I was both very tired and somewhat pleased to call it a night! LOL

In terms of flavor this is tasty but the recipe is too fussy for me to make it again.  I do like the combination of gingerbread and chocolate… and my DH and co-workers really enjoyed it… so I can see making chocolate gingerbread with ganache icing at some point in the future.

If you’d like the recipe, please visit this week’s host Heather of Sherry Trifle… and while you’re at it please check out the rest of the TwD bakers too. 

Have a delicious day!

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