Month: January 2009

I had no idea gingerbread was for eating.  I’ve always associated it with construction material – like the play dough I used to make for day camp – used for houses that support loads of candy and cookies that stand up and run in cartoons. Who knew you could eat it, too.

Dorie’s ginger chocolate cake is lovely – an adult, not-too-chocolaty variation of a chocolate cake that made me very happy during an otherwise very depressing time of year (have you been to Chicago in January?  You’ll find every shade of gray imaginable). Also, the chocolate icing kind of hardened when it cooled, so I could safely pack it for lunch at work without fear that I would embarrass myself licking the frosting off the foil I had wrapped the cake in.

An added bonus, I found that this dessert has health benefits.  Red wine and chocolate have become cliché, but ginger has a lot going for it, too, and so it was with a little less remorse that I scarfed down Dorie’s chocolate gingerbread. Ginger seems to interfere with some other medications, but in otherwise healthy people ginger has been shown to reduce diarrhea;  nausea caused by seasickness, morning sickness and chemotherapy; and joint pain from arthritis, though studies on this have been inconsistent. More important to me and my cheese addiction, ginger may have blood thinning and cholesterol lowering properties that may make it useful for treating heart disease.

I’m just sayin’.

Instead of a 9×9 pan (which Dorie herself told the TWD bloggers was crucial) I used 11 aluminum custard cups, and I still had WAY too much batter – I totally could have used 13 or 14, but those 11 were the last ones leftover from Thanksgiving.

The recipe was chosen by the blogger at Sherry Trifle. It was a great choice, and she’ll post the recipe there. I recommend you pick it up. I had one other variation to note: I used 1/3 c. molasses and made up the rest with honey to avoid a trip to the grocery store for such a small amount of an ingredient I use so infrequently. I think it turned out just fine.

Dorie says this is a basic, but sometimes simple is best.  This recipe was a hit in my house and at a New Year’s Eve party (but many at the party were feeling no pain by the time I pulled out the dessert tray, so who knows).  I reserved a few for personal consumption in the days following the party, and they were GREAT with champagne.

Rather than bake one huge cheesecake I used a mini cheesecake pan and made nearly two dozen bit-sized cakes.  But since I used a lot of crust for these cakes I still had enough filling left over to pour 12 mini pies (you know the little ones Keebler makes and sells in boxes of 6? I had some in my pantry from a summertime key lime pie experiment) and to pout a bit of the batter down the garbage disposal. If I do this again, I’ll double the recipe for the crust.

Because I used the mini cake molds, I didn’t get to wrap them all in foil and bake them in a water bath, and that was just fine.  The cakes still turned out light and creamy after about 25 minutes in the oven, though the edges rose considerably more than the centers. I filled a few of the holes with pieces of a Snickers bar and (even though the NYE host mocked me for that) I thought it made for a nice tray.

The only thing I did to change Dorie’s tried and true recipe was to use store-bought almond Biscotti for the crust, rather than the graham crackers, ginger snaps or chocolate wafer cookies that she recommended. I loved it that way.

You can find Dorie’s recipe at AnneStrawberry. She turned her cheesecake into a peppermint bark treat that looks very festive.