A comforting recipe for a comforting cake

It's gingerbread, but it's not cookies, but it's still kind of holiday-ish.

I’m a little bit showing off my collection of vintage glass ornaments, which I always find at thrift stores. Our tree fell over two years ago and broke half of them, which (silver lining alert) gave me an excuse to look for them again.

On my old blog, this cake is the recipe that still gets the very most traffic, which makes me feel like everyone is really needing some comfort. (It’s not just a feeling I have. Everyone is really needing some comfort.) I wonder if everybody’s great aunt made a recipe like this, and people are wracking their brains, googling “gingerbread soft sticky plain old lady,” hoping to recreate the experience of being hugged into somebody’s reassuring and floury bosom. I got this recipe from my mom, whose own version included blueberries, which, if I’m being honest, are the opposite of what this cake is going for.

This texture! It’s indecent.

What this cake is going for is fragrant, cozy, and unchallenging. It’s perfect and it’s easy and you already have all the ingredients in your home! Unless you forgot that your bottle of molasses contains not 16 but 12 ounces, and so you will be short 4 ounces because you made this same cake last week! (Swap in some dark corn syrup, which you still have from your Thanksgiving pecan pies, right?)

My weirdo kefir jar is making a little cameo back there, looking like Joseph in a fermentation-themed nativity play.

Also, if you don’t have quite enough powdered ginger (I had, like, half a tablespoon?), you can grate some fresh in, but I almost don’t even want to head down that particular path with you, because then we’re going to add black pepper and cardamom and, wow, are we making a Soft and Spicy Chai Cake all of a sudden—and should we? We should. With vanilla too! And strong black tea instead of boiling water! Okay, okay, let’s put a pin in this whole conversation. JFC.

This is my math-driven homemade gluten-free white flour blend, which, like many excellent gf recipes in my life, comes from Nicole Hunn at Gluten Free on a Shoestring. Side note: I feel like my handwriting is deteriorating. Does it look like I wrote that with my foot?

I’ll leave you with this paragraph I wrote back when my ADULT SON was 8 years old:

I was going to make a note here about how this is a great way to get more iron into your diet, what with the legendary iron-containing properties of molasses, but when I looked at my molasses bottle, I noticed that, to achieve your daily requirement, you’d need to swallow 25 tablespoons of it. If you’re anemic, try eating the whole pan of gingerbread all by yourself, and let me know if you feel a burst of energy afterwards (I’m being ironic. Ha ha.). But I will tell you that Ben and I were talking over dinner about how your body actually needs small quantities of various metals, which surprised and delighted him. “Wow,” he said. “If I died and you melted me down, would there be enough copper in me to make even, like, a tiny, tiny dollhouse spoon?” Kill me.

Soft and Sticky Gingerbread

Because there is celiac disease in my household, all my baking is gluten-free. For this cake, I use 1 ½ cups King Arthur Measure for Measure, which contains both xanthan gum and the title of a Shakespeare play, and ½ a cup of my own blend, which contains neither gum nor play, because apparently I am very picky about the right amount of xanthan gum (I actually am) and have a PhD in Renaissance Literature (I actually do).

½ cup sugar
½ cup room-temperature butter
2 eggs
1 cup molasses
2 cups all-purpose flour (or some other flour combo of your choosing)
1 teaspoon kosher salt or half as much table salt (more if your butter is unsalted)
¼ teaspoon cloves
½ teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon nutmeg (ideally freshly grated, which you can use your microplane for)
1 teaspoon powdered ginger (go ahead and add some fresh too, if you can’t help yourself)
1 cup boiling water
2 teaspoons baking soda

Heat the oven to 350, and butter and flour a lasagna-sized (10 by 14 inch) baking pan. (It’s not out of the question that you’ll be done with the batter before the oven is preheated.) Put the water on to boil.

Now, in the bowl of an electric mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until it’s very light and fluffy (give it a few minutes), then add the eggs one at a time, followed by the molasses. Take a moment to stop the mixer and scrape the bottom of the bowl with a rubber spatula to make sure there’s no butter hiding out down there. Don’t worry if it looks a little curdled—it’s fine. (Also don’t worry if it doesn’t look a little curdled! That’s fine too!)

Meanwhile, sift together the flour, spices, and salt (and by “sift together” I mean, of course, whisk together, because lazy), then mix them into the batter until they just disappear. 

Now measure the boiling water (I do this right in the dirty molasses cup), add the baking soda to it, call your kids (or grandkids sob) over to see the amazingly foaming mixture, explain the science of it—that each crystal of baking soda actually contains a tiny, burping angel—and beat it gently into the batter, which will now seem incredibly runny, which is TOTALLY fine! Full disclosure: I always swear that I’ll take the bowl out of the stand mixer and beat the water in gently by hand? But then I’m too lazy, so I mix it in the mixer, and it sloshes everywhere. I don’t recommend.

Pour the batter into your prepared pan and bake for about 30 minutes, until the cake is just starting to pull away from the sides of the pan and a toothpick comes out clean or with moist crumbs on it, rather than ooky batter still. You should probably check it at 25 minutes. (This is the kind of annoying cake that thinks it’s funny to go from underbaked to overbaked in the span of 4 minutes.) As it cools, the top will get dark and sticky, which is kind of lovely. Serve with whipped cream, if you have company, or plain. Yum. It’s really good the next day too! Maybe even at its peak then.

Okay, here’s a question for the kind of people who read down this far: should I make these cookies for the holidays or am I just going to wish they were almond flavored?

xxoo