Recipes

Super simple, richly coloured, tasty ginger molasses cake. Oil in cakes make them lovely and moist, and who could be bothered with creaming butter and sugar. Otherwise the basics are in the ‘dry stuff’ and the ‘wet stuff’ lists, add whatever optional things you like. Easy to make vegan, either intentionally, or because you forgot to get any eggs. Because that would never happen to me…

Ingredients

• Dry stuff:
  • 2.5 c plain flour
  • 1 heaped tsp baking powder
  • 1 heaped tsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp ground ginger
  • 1/2 tsp allspice
  • 1/4 tsp white pepper
  • 2/3 c sugar
• Wet stuff:
  • 1/2 c oil (I typically use olive oil for the herby flavour)
  • 1/3 c molasses (backstrap)
• Other stuff you could add if you like:
  • 1/2 c yoghurt. This is something I’d typically add, but it would probably work without.
  • 1 egg. Sometimes this goes in. Sometimes not. Still can’t tell if it makes a difference.
  • 2 tsp grated fresh ginger. John recommended this fantastic addition. Ginger is good.
  • Sub out some sugar for dates or prunes blended in water if you want, this gives an even darker colour to the cake. Add this to the ‘wet’ stuff.
  • A mangy, way-too-ripe-to-eat banana. Blend it into the ‘wet’ stuff.
  • Salt. Because butter normally has salt, if you are really into your salt you might want to add it. I never bother.

Turn the oven on to ~180 C, and prep a large cake tin with parchment (just on the base is fine.

Mix all the dry ingredients in a big bowl.

Mix all the wet ingredients in a separate bowl. I typically blend these, because it is easy to make sure everything is well mixed. But it does depend on what you put in there.

Mix the wet stuff into the dry stuff. Add water (or milk I guess if you want, but water is fine) to get it to a cake batter consistency. If it is too moist it just takes longer to bake. But still comes out fine in the end (as I said, oil makes for a gorgeous, fool-proof, moist cake).

Bake. It should be done in about 45 mins. Turn out onto a rack to cool fully. The crust should go nice and moist too after storage in an airtight container.