Homemade Gingerbread Cake

Hands-down one of the best gingerbread recipes I’ve ever tasted. This is the sort of recipe that will please everyone around your holiday table and will be requested year after year, guaranteed! This homemade gingerbread cake is so tasty I wonder why we need to wait until holiday time to make it?!

I love this sort of recipe because if you have a well-stocked pantry, you most likely already have all of the ingredients on hand. Not only is the fragrant combination of cinnamon, ginger, and cloves perfect in this batter, the moist crumb of the cake (thanks to the buttermilk, baking soda, and powder) is unlike any other gingerbread I’ve ever tasted. I think of a traditional gingerbread as a dense-ish cake, but this cake’s crumb is pillowy and super moist. I will be dog-earring this recipe to make again when family comes to town in December!

I did add the confectioners’ sugar to the whipped cream. I left my butter out on the counter for about 4 hours so that it was truly at room temperature when I needed it and that made the creaming process go smoothly and quickly. As for grating the ginger, I find the best way to grate fresh ginger root is with a microplane grater.

Lovely served with a soft, vanilla-scented whipped cream. I can also see this fragrant cake being lovely with vanilla ice cream or even a warm crème anglaise. I made it in a 9×9-inch cake pan and it easily serves 10 people.

Usually when I bring a cake to work, I take a few slices home at the end of the day. Not this time. This gingerbread cake was gone, not even a crumb left, after only a few hours. Needless to say, it’s good. The flavor is crazy gingery, the cake is tender and moist, and the recipe is easy to make. That’s a win in my book.

It’s intensely gingery the day it’s baked and mellows as it sits. Neither is better and neither is worse. It’s all delicious. The other spices are there, too, so no worries about a one-trick pony here. I skipped the whipped cream part (I’m lactose intolerant and didn’t want the temptation or the stomach ache) and the cake is delicious on its own.

I baked the ginger cake in a 9-inch-square pan and it was perfectly baked in 45 minutes. The suggested timings are correct. A sensible person could get up to 16 servings from this cake, but 9 seems more realistic.

I don’t know what prompted me to ask how anyone would feel if I made a homemade gingerbread cake, but the response was unanimously positive, so I went in search of a gingerbread recipe that called out to me. Who could resist this one with fresh ginger and soft cream? Certainly not me! I was especially attracted to the 3 tablespoons of grated fresh ginger, which proved to be a big plus.

The gingerbread had a lovely texture and added an appealing zing that sweet gingerbread can lack. My ginger was young, fresh, and tender, and had almost none of the fibers it was suggested to leave behind. My baking time was 49 minutes. It was hard to wait to taste this. “Cool completely” simply did not happen!

I served it with both plenty of whipped cream and also a dish of lingonberry preserves. I would always prefer my whipped cream without the addition of either or both the confectioners’ sugar or the vanilla, but everyone else preferred it with both of these additions.

While I have a Bundt pan collection, I was not traveling with a Bundt pan. I had both suggested pans available to me and selected the 9-inch square over the loaf pan.

I hadn’t made a gingerbread or cake in a long time, but the combination of fresh and powdered ginger is a great intensifier of one of our favorite ingredients and is worth returning to.

I used dark muscavado sugar for my dark brown sugar. I didn’t have the suggested 9-by-9-inch pan but my Pyrex 8-by-8 is actually about 8 1/2 inches square at the top and it worked pretty well. A 10-inch round would have been a good substitution but mine was quite deep and I didn’t want to risk a broken cake when I turned it out. At 45 minutes it was perfect and easily came out of the baking dish which I had prepared with buttered parchment. So definitely do NOT overbake.

The second time, I used 4 tablespoons grated ginger, 2 teaspoons ground ginger and I increased the cloves, although that may dance too close to spice cake for some folks. The cake is moist and just as nice the next day as it was the evening it came out of the oven. Adding a piece of crystalized preserved ginger with the cream makes this officially a triple gingerbread! When shared with friends who are good cooks, and they gave it a thumbs up as well for “very good, great fresh ginger flavor and texture” and they served it with a dab of cream cheese, both at room temp and toasted.

So maybe we are ginger freaks, but this is a winner.

This recipe produced a moist homemade gingerbread cake and soft whipped cream. We ate it with some sliced, sugared peaches and it was delish! Lemon curd would be nice with it, of course.

I thought I had done a good job of keeping ginger fibers out of the mix, but there were a lot of them caught on the bottom of the mixer paddle after mixing the batter. I used an oval baking dish 24 mm by 34 mm and that worked fine.