Friday, October 27, 2006

GINGERBREAD


Before we get to the Gingerbread recipe for Mindy, I watched a program on SBS last night about the town of Grafton and it's Jacaranda Festival. The Jacaranda Queen is chosen from the local girls and they were interviewed on what it was like to be the Queen for a year. There was a lot of old film footage as the Festival has been going since the early 1930s and the one thing I noticed most was the lack of coloured and asian faces. Nowhere and I looked very hard.

GINGERBREAD
(sorry, but it's so old it's teaspoons & cups)
4 ounces Butter
1 cup golden syrup
21/2 cups plain flour
3 teaspoons bicarb soda
2 teaspoons cinnamon
pinch of salt
1 cup of hot water
1 egg
1/2 cup castor sugar
2 teaspoons ground ginger
pinch of ground cloves

Melt butter, combine with hot water, syrup and beaten egg.
Sift dry ingredients into basin, make well in centre, add liquid gradually.
Beat until mixture is smooth.
Pour into greased, grease-proof paper lined 9 inch slab tin.
Bake in moderately slow oven for 40 minutes.
When cold, top with lemon icing.

LEMON ICING
Sift 1 cup of soft icing sugar, (use pure icing suger and you'll need a jackhammer to slice it) add 1/2 teaspoon of butter and enough lemon juice to make a stiff paste.
Stand the bowl over hot water, beat icing until of spreading consistancy.

The cake and icing is perfect for freezing. If you cut it into slices, it only takes about ten minutes to thaw out. If you can't wait then you can be like Ron and me and eat it frozen.

7 comments:

Link said...

Nummy nummy nummy

Unknown said...

LOL! Peace and Greetings!

In canada we still use cups etc...

just made cookies tonight and for the season I thought a dash of cayenne pepper would dothe trick ...and a couple of shots of almoretto .... quite lovely!

Peace and Blessings.

Unknown said...

I might start up a Queen of the Mountains competition as soon as I work out how to rig the results.

JahTeh said...

Link, don't forget the lemon icing, it does make all the difference.

I know Canada is going into winter but cayenne in the cookies? We're going into summer but today it snowed not far from Melbourne so I would have enjoyed a couple of shots of almond liqueur.

Ron, you're so the famewhore, you've already got the Lavender Queen thing sewn up and now the Mountains?

GS said...

I caught the end of the Grafton doco and it made a nice counterpiece to "Little Miss Sunshine" which I saw the next day :)

JahTeh said...

They went for real women I'll give them that, not a silicone job in the bunch.

From the lion's mouth said...

Don't apologise for using teaspoons and cups! It's so much better than weights, which I always convert to cups anyway cause I don't have scales :-)

I always add a teaspoon of white pepper to gingerbread or ginger biscuits - it gives it an extra zing.