Ginger bread.

Ginger bread means to me getting taken to school jumping of all the front doorsteps of the terraced houses on the way and getting a ginger bread man on a Friday from the bakers. A end of the week treat for being good I think.

A good ginger bread should be dense and a little sticky, in fact you should keep it for a couple of days so that it is at its best. This particular recipe is more like a cake than a biscuit. But it is very good and bake it in a loaf tin and call it bread and you will be forgiven that. Personally I much prefer this to the more traditional biscuit type so here we go.

To make you will need.

450g/1ld plain flour
3 level tsp ground ginger
3tsp baking powder
1tsp bicarbonate of soda
1tsp of salt
225g/8oz brown sugar
185/6oz butter
170g/6oz treacle or molasses
170g/6oz golden syrup or light corn syrup
570ml/20floz milk
1 large egg

Sift all the dry ingredients in to a large bowl apart from the sugar. Then take your sugar, treacle, syrup and butter and place in to a sauce pan. Do not apply to much heat all you are trying to do is melt and blend every thing together. Once the butter has melted and every thing is all mixed together you can start to get ready for the mixing of the batter.

Take the egg and crack that in to a bowl and beat it. Once you have toughly beaten the egg add the milk to it.

Now a little at a time add some of the sugar butter and syrup mix and then some of the milk and egg mix to the dry mix. What you want to do is slowly make sure that every thing gets blended together. If you have a table mixer with a bowl on it that is the ideal thing for doing this. Just start a little at a time and then add more and more each time. You will find that as you go along it will become easier and better to handle. The thing not to do is just add too much of the sugar mix in one go. If you do you do have a bit of a job trying to get all the lumps out of it all.

Once you have a smooth batter pour it in to a Lined cake tin cake tin. Bake in a preheated oven for about one and a half hours at 180°c 350°f or gas mark 4. Once cooked take out of the oven and allow to cool. Then turn on to a cooling rack. When cold rap in tin foil or place it in a tin still in the lining from the cake tin. If you remove this it will stick to the foil or the tin.

Then after a day or so then open it up and cut of a slice of sweet ginger magic.