Hairy Bikers ginger cake recipe comes with an instruction most cakes do not, which is to wrap it up and wait. That recipe is in British Classics, where six spices and a jar of stem ginger feed eight at about 550 calories, though the whole thing takes 1 hour 42 minutes including cooling.
Dave writes in British Classics that it is “as good as the one my Auntie Mary used to make”, calling it a Lakes classic. They rate it among their best-ever cake recipes, and the spicing explains why, since there is cayenne in there alongside the ginger.
That heat only lands properly if the batter is right, and it comes out very wet and pourable. Do not add flour to thicken it, because the recipe is built that way and a stiffer mix gives you a drier cake.
Hairy Bikers Ginger Cake Recipe
Description
Butter, muscovado, golden syrup, treacle and stem ginger syrup all melt together in one pan before the milk, bicarbonate of soda and eggs go in. That gets poured into the spiced flour with chopped stem ginger stirred through, then baked slowly in a brownie tin. It keeps and improves for days.
Ingredients
For the Spiced Flour:
For the Pan:
To Finish the Batter:
Instructions
- Line the tin: Heat the oven to 170°C/Fan 150°C/Gas 3½, then line a 30 x 20cm tin with baking paper. A straight-sided brownie tin is just right.
- Mix the spices in: Sift the flour into a large bowl, add the ginger, cayenne, cinnamon, allspice, mace and cloves, then mix lightly to combine.
- Melt the wet mix: Put the butter, sugar, golden syrup, 50g of syrup from the stem ginger jar and the treacle into a pan, then set it over a gentle heat until everything has melted together.
- Whisk in the rest: Take the pan off the heat and whisk in the milk, bicarbonate of soda and eggs.
- Combine: Gradually add the contents of the pan to the flour, mixing until everything is well combined. You will have a very wet, pourable batter.
- Add the ginger: Drain the balls of stem ginger and rinse them, then chop them finely and stir them through the batter.
- Bake it: Pour the batter into the tin and bake for 45 to 60 minutes. It is done when the edges have pulled back slightly from the sides and the top is springy to the touch.
- Cool and keep: Cool in the tin for half an hour, then turn it out onto a wire rack. Wrap it and keep it for a few days if you can, since the stickiness develops as it matures.
FAQs
Is this an easy ginger cake to make?
It is one of the easier cakes in the book, because there is no creaming stage. Butter, sugar, syrup and treacle all melt together in a pan, so you never beat anything and you do not need a mixer at all.
Compare it with the dundee cake, which starts by beating butter and sugar for three to four minutes until light and fluffy, and only works if you get that stage right. Here the pan does the job for you and the batter comes together in one bowl. The only thing that needs care is not overmixing once the wet meets the flour.
How long do I actually have to wait before cutting it?
You can eat it the day you make it, but the recipe is clear that a few days wrapped up makes it better. Si and Dave say the stickiness develops as it matures, and this is a sticky ginger cake by design rather than by accident.
Wrap it whole rather than in slices, in baking paper then foil, and keep it somewhere cool rather than the fridge. It is not the only bake in these books built around waiting. Bara brith soaks its dried fruit in tea overnight before it even reaches the oven, which is why it runs to over thirteen hours start to finish.
What if I have no stem ginger, and how much is a jar?
Si and Dave give the substitution themselves. Leave the ginger out and use an extra 50g of golden syrup in place of the 50g of stem ginger syrup, so 200g of golden syrup in total. You lose the little nuggets through the crumb, though two tablespoons of ground ginger still do the heavy work.
If you are using a jar, a standard one is around 200g, of which roughly 130g is ginger once drained. That is what the recipe expects, so if yours is bigger, weigh out about 130g of drained balls rather than tipping the lot in. There is also a tip in the book worth knowing while you are handling the sticky ingredients: oil the spoon before you measure the syrup and treacle, and both slide straight off instead of clinging to it.
Why is there cayenne pepper in a cake?
Half a teaspoon of it, and it is the thing that makes this recipe different from every other gingerbread. The book already warns that 2 tablespoons of ground ginger makes for quite a hot cake, so the cayenne is stacked on top of heat that is already there rather than replacing it.
It also explains some confusion online. People search for this as a Jamaican ginger cake, partly because it is dark and sticky and partly because of that pepper. It is not Jamaican though, it is a British gingerbread from the Lakes, and the book traces the British love of ginger all the way back to Tudor times.
What do I do with the rest of the stem ginger jar?
A jar goes further than one cake, and both the syrup and the balls keep for months once opened. The rhubarb crumble takes four balls cut into slivers, which is a good use for them since rhubarb and ginger belong together.
For something closer to this cake, ginger and treacle scones use three balls finely chopped and follow the same melt-in-a-pan method with treacle, ground ginger, cinnamon and allspice. Same flavours, twelve scones instead of one cake, and forty minutes instead of a week of waiting.
