Esther's gingerbread two ways

On Saturday I went to make a pear and ginger upside-down cake that I'd seen a delicious-looking recipe for in the last few weeks but I was unable to find the recipe. I trawled through blogs I might have seen it on and flicked through books and magazines I'd read recently in the hope of finding it... but it's still a mystery and I'm thinking I may have just dreamt about it.

Instead, I used "Ester's gingerbread" from Ruth Pretty with a few tweaks to create what I had in my mind. It really is THE BEST gingerbread. Lovely and moist and equally good with a chunk of creamy blue or in this case, pears, walnuts and a spoonful of softly whipped cream.

I made the full recipe (nearly half a block of butter...eeek) but distributed it into two loaf tins instead of one as per the recipe. In one (baking paper-lined) tin I spread a mixture of 25g butter and 50g brown sugar (melted gently together over a low heat), 1/2 cup of chopped walnuts, and two finely-sliced, peeled and quartered buerre bosc pear.

Although the upside-down brown sugar bit went slightly toffee-ish, it made a delicious winter pudding with a little cream on the side. It was even better the next day reheated with a drizzle of golden syrup.

For the second loaf, I poured the remaining batter into the tin and dotted in a cup or so of diced pear. This made a good "tin-filler" and lasted several days as a treat to have with a cup of tea.

old school baking

Some recent baking with a retro theme...classic ginger crunch from Chloe's blog, and an old favourite, St Mary's chocolate cake from our school days. The ginger crunch is a recipe for GC purists with the requisite thin biscuity base, rather than the substantial slabs more often seen in cafes these days. Delicious. Although I do also love the oaty version made famous by Takaha's Wholemeal Cafe.

The chocolate cake recipe was the one provided for the baking competition at our primary school flower shows, and is a perfect tin filler - whipped up in a flash with one bowl, and reliably good without being too rich or fancy. The incredible chocolate icing makes it a bit more special, this is truly the BEST way to top an (everyday sort of) chocolate cake. Although sometimes we used to cut the cake in half, sandwich it together with mock cream and dust the top with icing sugar. How's that for nostalgic...


I made a coffee cake too, with walnuts in it, something else we used to make a lot as kids. The recipe is over at pod and three peas, and the cake provides more retro deliciousness.



St Mary's Chocolate Cake


1 c milk
4 eggs
150 melted butter
2 tsp vanilla
4 tsp baking powder
6 tbsp cocoa
2 c sugar
2 c flour


Combine wet ingredients in a bowl and beat well. Add dry ingredients and mix to combine. Bake at 180c for 1-1 1/2 hours.

a warm pudding for a cold night

Ginger Parkin with rhubarb & spiced syrup

I hadn't heard of parkin until I came across this recipe on the Guardian website. Parkin is a gingerbread cake traditionally made with oats and molasses that originates in Northern England. The recipe I used didn't have molasses in it, just lots of brown sugar, golden syrup and a little bit of treacle. I didn't use treacle as I didn't want to buy a whole tin of the stuff for one recipe so just used extra golden syrup and a bit of dark muscovado sugar.

I was very tempted to buy an ice cream maker just so I could make the accompanying rhubarb ripple ice cream. But instead I served the parkin with vanilla ice cream and roasted rhubarb. Tart rhubarb is just what this dessert needs: with all that golden syrup it's very sweet. I'll try making the ice cream with Bec's deluxe ice cream maker when in Christchurch sometime.

I also improvised with the "hot spiced treacle" and melted a little bit of golden syrup and added a couple of pinches of mixed spice.

The parkin had an interesting texture - dense and quite chewy. It wasn't as moist as I expected but apparently it gets better with age. The recipe says for the best flavour, keep in an airtight container for three weeks so I will report back on its keeping qualities in a few weeks!