What I love about this recipe, originally from The Common Sense Cookery Book, introduced to me by my friend Beck:
It tastes amazing.
It has a lovely grown-up, old-world charm about it and feels a bit dainty when served with a cup of tea of coffee.
It’s ginger. Need I say more?
It’s made from ingredients already in the pantry (no shopping)
It has a short baking time
It’s ginger.
The two cakes are thin and cool quickly, ready to assemble.
It’s cheap as chips to make: no more than $3
It’s ginger.
Did I say, it’s ginger?
Thanks a bunch, Beck. Love, love, love it.
- 1 tablespoon butter
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1 egg
- 1/2 cup milk
- 1 tablespoon golden syrup
- 1 cup plain flour
- 2 teaspoons ground ginger
- 2 teaspoons cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon bicarb soda
Mock Cream Filling & Topping
- 4 tablespoons butter
- 1 cup sifted icing sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
- Preheat oven to 180 degrees celcius, 160 degrees if fan-forced. Grease and flour two 18cm diameter round shallow cake pans.
- Beat butter and sugar to a cream. In another bowl, beat egg milk and golden syrup together. Add to creamed butter and sugar.
- Fold in sifted flour, ginger, cinnamon and bicarb soda. Distribute evenly between the two pans and bake for around 15 minutes.
- Check if cooked through using a skewer which should come out clean from the middle of the cakes. Turn onto wire rack and cool.
- While cakes are cooling, make mock cream by eating butter and sugar to a cream, then gently adding icing sugar and vanilla essence.
- When cakes are cooled, use half mock cream to sandwich them together, and use the other half to ice the top of the cake.
foodthatserves 
I like the missing b in step 5. I’ll make sure I do that! 🙂
Funny!
I tried making this yesterday and the texture turned out a bit funny. Does it really fit across two cake tins? Seems like it’d be really thin and my mixture barely covered the base when I tried it in two tins- am I doing something wrong? Nonetheless the gingery-cinnamon flavour was delicious!
Hi Emily. Not sure what went wrong, as every recipe I blog about, I’ve tried in my own kitchen first. I’ve triple checked the quantities and ingredients list too (in case of a typo, but no errors on that front). It’s a bit hard to trouble shoot over the net, but I will have a go!
The layers are meant to be thin – that’s one of the things that’s great about this cake – it means it cools really quickly and the whole eating experience isn’t too rich or dense. Having said that, it needs to be big enough, so:
1. Check the size of your tins – are they more than 18cm in diameter? If the are, you might like to double the cake component to ensure there’s enough cake quantity. If you do this, you’ll need to increase the cooking time and start checking at the 15 min mark as per the recipe.
2. If larger cake tins aren’t your problem, you might just like to make it ensuring that all your measures are little on the fat side – an easy way to increase the mixture a little, but make sure you’re a little heavy-handed with everything in the ingredients list.
3. Check your bi-carb quantity – it does need the full teaspoon to get the rise it’s meant to have. To cover the taste of the bi-carb in the cake, the recipe calls for lots of cinnamon and ginger, so increase those a little more if you choose to increase the bi-carb a little.
4. If you’re still having problems, you could just make it as a single layer with mock cream icing on top.
I hope some of these suggestions help!