Gingerbread Experiment No. 2, Final Results

The test cake, after my spouse and I tried it--
bear in mind it's only 7" in diameter.

The final product for my MIL.

Last night, I made my gingerbread cake again, using the pressure cooker function of my Instant Pot, and the original gingerbread recipe from my Crock Pot cookbook.  It came out well, though it was a little too soft in the center--perhaps I should have set the pressure time for 65 minutes instead of 60?  I will do that with the cake I make for my mother-in-law.  I will also use my new Instant Pot bundt pan for that cake.  This one, my husband and I will eat.  

I made some cream cheese glaze again, as I did at Christmas, to use as frosting.  The final result can be seen beside this post.  (As always, clicking on the image should show the picture larger and with greater detail.)  

It's obvious that I'd starve if I tried to make it as a food photographer, but the pictures do give a reasonable idea of the appearance of the finished product.  The cake is not quite symmetrical, but it is tasty, and not overly sweet.  My spouse considers it a qualified success.

NOTE:  (2/14/2021)  The bundt pan cake for my mother-in-law was an unqualified success!  I pressure cooked it for one hour and 5 minutes and the combination of the longer cooking time and the bundt pan (with its heat-conducting cone through the center) cooked the cake to perfection.  My mother-in-law, not being the type of person to rave about things, couldn't say enough nice things about it.  I've attached a photograph above.   We still have about an 1/8th or less of the test cake left. 

Gingerbread Experiment, No. 2

Nordic Ware bundt pan sold on Amazon,  8.4" x 2.9"
(picture found on Amazon.com)

With Christmas 11 months away, the universe decided to tempt me into making my gingerbread cake again, much sooner.

My mother-in-law's birthday is in early February, and the family was looking for ways to celebrate it without having a big meet-up that might spread COVID. So as we started talking about gifts we could bring her, and I mentioned the gingerbread cake I made for Christmas (some of which I had actually given to my mother-in-law).  Everyone urged me to make one for her birthday. Naturally, I agreed. 

Having received a 6-quart Instant Pot for Christmas, I can use that to make the cake. Though my Instant Pot has a "bake" function, I have no idea what temperature to set to bake the cake. So I probably will simply use the Pot's slow cooker function and double the recipe again.  Because an Instant Pot lets you set your pot to slow cook for a prescribed time, I can set the pot for a maximum cooking time so that the cake doesn't scorch as it did the last time.

I also have to decide whether to replace some of the molasses with honey, as I did last time, and whether to find a different cream cheese frosting recipe.  The last batch of cream cheese frosting (which I made with a little more than one-quarter of the recommended sugar) was tasty, and does wonderful things to Greek yogurt if you stir a few teaspoons into it, but it wasn't very frosting-like.  It tended to want to spread out and drip off of the cake.  But I'm still reluctant to use butter in the frosting.  I will have to consider recipes very carefully before I start baking.  Wish me luck!

EDIT:  (1/23/2021)  I started looking for Instant Pot Gingerbread recipes on the Internet and found several where the flour and liquid ingredient content of the cake came very close to my recipe.  So I think I'm going to make the cake using the pressure cooking feature instead.  I also found two sizes of cake pan (one for a bundt cake) that should fit in my Instant Pot.  If the frosting comes out runny, that won't really matter with a bundt cake; it would be an advantage.  Onward!

The Gingerbread Experiment

The last few pieces of cake, with frosting.

At the beginning of the month, in my post about the history of gingerbread, I mentioned that I was going to be making my own gingerbread for Christmas. A picture of the fruit of my effort accompanies this post. 

As the earlier post said, nowadays "gingerbread" can take one of several forms. It can be a cookie (thin and crisp, thicker and crunchy, or thicker still and chewy), or a cake. I chose to try out a gingerbread cake recipe found in a cookbook designed for use with the brand of slow cooker that I have. 

It happened that the recipe was designed for a 4 1/2 quart round slow cooker. I have a 6 quart oval slow cooker. After a brief search for a cake pan that would fit inside my slow cooker, I decided to double the recipe instead and use the crock itself as the cake pan, greasing it thoroughly with butter first. Up to this point, all went according to plan, except that I discovered that I didn't have enough molasses for the doubled recipe. So I used honey for the last 4 ounces required. 

In the end, the cake took twice as long to cook as the recipe called for. Possibly, given that I had doubled the volume of batter involved, I should have expected that. Then I got interrupted, so I set the pot on "keep warm" and left it for another half hour. The extra half-hour was too much--the entire outside surface of the cake (i.e., the part that touched the wall of my crock) was scorched to varying degrees. But the rest of the cake was wonderful--rich, chewy, and dense, and full of flavor. By this time, it was nearly 3:00 a.m. on Christmas Eve, so we left matters until later that morning. 

Getting the cake out took some effort; I had to run a thin metal spatula around the inside of the crock, and then my husband had to remove the crock from the rest of the pot and tip it upside down.  But it came out, almost completely intact. I hadn't been planning to make icing, but given the obviously scorched sides, that now seemed like a good idea. 

I opened a web browser and looked for a plausible cream cheese frosting recipe. The recipe I found uses no butter--just confectioners' sugar, an 8-ounce block of regular cream cheese, and a pinch of salt. The recipe called for vanilla extract, which I ignored (I had plenty, but I didn't want to use it) and for 3 cups of sugar, which I cut to about a cup and a half. Moreover, I don't have an electric mixer, so I had to combine the ingredients using a whisk, helping the effort along with a few tablespoons of heavy cream.  The resulting frosting was creamy enough, but never formed peaks.  Though it eventually set, I originally feared that it would be too runny to stay put, so I only put it on the top surface of the cake. 

So the frosting ended up not acting as a cosmetic disguise.  I'm still glad I made it--its cream cheese flavor was the perfect compliment to the cake. I'm also glad we chose to give away about half of the cake as Christmas presents and that a fair amount of the rest was too scorched to eat--otherwise my husband and I might have gorged our selves impermissibly. 

But I already miss the cake.  Already I want to taste it again, and for that reason I expect I will make it again next year.

Cosmology for Christmas

I found this YouTube video via a link by a friend on a private mailing list. The channel owner, Christine Simpson, has not monetized her channel, has a tiny audience, and clearly made this video for fun. If you have the slightest interest in, or knowledge of, modern cosmology and physics, this video is very funny. If you are interested in having a Christmas party with a cosmological bent, watch it for the food ideas. Either way, I thought it worth sharing with my readers.

Christine, by the way, is interested in baking, sewing, dancing, and physics. She obtained a MSci in Physics at the Imperial College London in 2013, and she is presently working on her PhD in Gravitational Wave Data Analysis at the University of Edinburgh as part of the CDT in Data Science in the school of Maths and Informatics. She is way out of my league, but any of my readers interested in finding out more about her activities can check out her website, https://www.christinensimpson.com/.

Gingerbread!

Molded, gilded, & colored medieval-style
gingerbread in the form of a Tudor Rose.

Gingerbread by Tammy Crawford; Photo from GodeCookery.com

Gingerbread Men.  Photo by
alcinoe (originally from en.wikibooks,
transferred to Wikimedia Commons)

Cornish fairings.  Photo by foodista,
originally posted on Flickr

There are a combination of spices that so-called "First World" countries associate with the winter holidays, such as Thanksgiving (in the U.S.) and Christmas.  If you are American, Canadian or British, you likely know what they are. They include ginger, cinnamon, black pepper and cloves.  Nutmeg, mace, and allspice later joined the list as Western explorers discovered them in Indonesia and the Caribbean.  

Today, these combinations of spices are associated in our minds with the flavor of pumpkin pie, spice cakes, and ... gingerbread! Gingerbread turns out to be a very changeable concept, assuming different forms in different periods.

During the high Middle Ages, gingerbread was not a bread, cake, or cookie.  It was a kind of sticky candy made with honey and bread crumbs, and flavored with the "holiday" spices we still use today.  The topmost photograph to the left above shows a molded shape made from this sort of "gingerbread".  Yet ginger came to Europe through Asian trade with the Mediterranean; it was already known and used in Ancient Rome, and certainly predates the Middle Ages.  Ginger was originally cultivated in Southeast Asia, and is believed to exist only as a cultigen, and not in a wild form.  So tracing the travels of ginger across the world doesn't really pin down how long "gingerbread" has existed, or even what forms it may have.

Nowadays, "gingerbread" might be a cookie, a hard biscuit, or a cake, and the various nations of Europe, as well as the English-speaking world, have their own characteristic forms of gingerbread; Wikipedia names a few of them here. American varieties often use molasses, a common sweetener in the United States that is a byproduct of the sugar cane processing process. 

Gingerbread cake with mountain cranberries
Photo: Johan Bryggare
(Wikimedia Commons)

But there is a lot of overlap between the forms of gingerbread, as I discovered when searching the Internet for information about ginger snaps the other day.  I think of "ginger snaps" as a hard crunchy cookie, that can range in form from wafer-thin to as much as a quarter-inch thick.  When I think of ginger snaps I think of a cookie made and sold in the Philadelphia area under the brand called Sweetzels.  Sweetzels actually sells similar cookies as "ginger snaps" and "spiced wafers"; the spiced wafers are easier to find where I live.

To my surprise, I learned that a type of cookie identical in appearance to the Sweetzels cookies is known in the United Kingdom as a "Cornish fairing" (see the second picture to the right).  A "fairing" is a treat sold at a country "fair", and fairs existed (and may still exist?) all over the United Kingdom.  The thick, ginger-flavored biscuit was characteristic of fairings sold in Cornwall in particular.

Much the same assortment of spices as have been used in gingerbreads have long been the key ingredients in pumpkin pie.  Nowadays these "pumpkin pie spices" are added to all kinds of foods, ranging from cereals to lattes.  That's done for one simple reason.  People like them, so they sell, or at least they sell in the fall and winter.  That likely means that gingerbread will never quite go away, because it has a similar flavor and invokes similar thoughts of celebration and holiday.  Meanwhile, I am planning to make a "gingerbread" cake for Christmas, in my slow cooker.  Sometimes, the more things change the more they remain the same.