GINGER AND CHOCOLATE CAKE

Nick and I have known each other for twenty years and our nineteenth wedding anniversary is next month.  So it still amazes me that every so often I find out something about him that I didn’t already know.

I know he’s not fond of cake.  This is a problem because I really enjoy making cake and now that I’m not going to work it’s an even bigger problem.  More time to bake cake but no more work colleagues to eat it !!  I end up timing my baking so that I can take a couple of slices to my appointment with the chiropodist or the dog’s hairdresser !!

This weekend I finally got to the bottom of Nick’s cake preferences.  It seems the only cakes he actually likes are rich fruit cakes, such as a Christmas cake, and the sticky type of cake you buy at the supermarket such as Jamaican ginger cake and the golden syrup and chocolate versions.  He especially dislikes any cake with fruit in it, particularly dried fruit.  (Unless it’s a Christmas cake.)

So there we are.  To be fair to him, he will always eat a slice of any cake, just to be polite, but one slice is enough, which leaves me with the rest of the cake.

This last weekend we had a double birthday, Dad on Sunday and Nick today.  It was Dad’s 85th so to mark the occasion we had a family lunch and I made a birthday cake for them both.  Dad will eat any cake (pretty much) so to make Nick happy I baked a ginger and chocolate Bundt cake.  I baked it to the recipe from the blog Dolly Bakes, which you can see here:

Sticky gingerbread Bundt cake.

This recipe suggests soaking the cake with a gingery syrup after it’s baked to make it extra sticky.  I didn’t do this but iced it with a chocolate icing instead.  You can find the recipe for the icing here:

Milk chocolate and toffee Bundt cake.

The cake recipe requires most of a bar of ginger chocolate and I was very tempted to eat the bit left over, but instead I used it in the icing along with the milk chocolate.  It was definitely worth the trouble of using the ginger chocolate I think. 

Having drizzled the chocolate icing on the cake I decorated it with some chopped crystallised ginger, edible gold stars and gold disco glitter. 

It was a fairly dense cake and although not very sticky without the ginger glaze, it was perfectly moist enough and the chocolate icing added some stickiness as it doesn’t quite set completely.  It had just the right balance of chocolate and ginger flavours, each being identifiable but neither being so strong as to wipe out the other. 

I have to say it looked gorgeous and tasted delicious.  Definitely worth doing again for a special birthday.  Or any excuse I can come up with !!

Cuts into 16 –20 slices.