After my last disastrous attempt to make gingerbread, I turned to my mother-in-law Lorraine for a reliable recipe. Here is how it goes…
Beat 2 eggs with 3/4 cup of brown sugar. Add 3/4 cup of molasses and 3 tbsp of melted shortening.
Sift together 2 1/4 cups of flour, 2 1/2 tsp of baking powder, 3/4 tsp of baking soda, 2 tsp of ginger, 1 1/2 tsp of cinnamon and 1/2 tsp of cloves.
Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients.
Add a little less than a cup of hot water to bring it altogether. I added the water to the cup that had the molasses in it, no point in wasting any!
Bake in a square pan at 350F for 1 hour. I had gone out and bought a heavy duty 9 x 9″ square pan just for this recipe.
The problem? At 45 minutes the bread not only smelled done, it was on the verge of burning. Maybe that heavy duty pan was a super conductor or heat? I took a bite. Totally dry!!! A friend on Facebook suggested I poke holes on the top and slather it with the lemon sauce I had made for the last gingerbread attempt.
Which is exactly what I did! I discovered a recipe for lemon curd and even made that and used it as an additional sauce:
Still, totally too dry! If the family recipe for gingerbread did not turn out, then maybe gingerbread is just meant to be a dry bread? So I am letting it go. There are too many great baked treats to be made and the holidays are almost here and I am running out of time!
So I am not the queen of gingerbread, I can live with that. At least I tried! TWICE!
I’m going to post our family recipe on Friday, not dry at all!
Maybe Lorraine’s cousin’s wife left out an ingredient?
I love gingerbread. I usually frost it with cream cheese frosting. It’s always a hit.
I’m sure the perfect recipe is out there somewhere and will find it’s way to you one day. I’m surprised that it was still dry after that nice bath in lemon curd, gosh it does look and sound so yummy though.
I picked up a gingerbead loaf at a Christmas market here last week. It was made with Guiness beer and is somewhat dry, but not too bad. I know when we were kids we always had gingerbread and it was quite dry unless we put a sauce over it. Nanny used to make a sauce out of flour, butter (now that i think about it it must have been like a roux) and then she added boiling water, sugar and vanilla. She’s cook until it coated the back of a spoon then serve hot on gingerbread or plum pudding.