My friend Maria is a great cook and a fabulous host. She has two lovely guinea pigs called Rufus and Ruby – Rufus came from the same rescue shelter that Borage did. This is her recipe for Marmalade Gingerbread that even those (like myself) who refuse to put marmalade on their toast will enjoy.
Usually I’m not one for taking photos of the different stages of cooking. This is for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I don’t have a beautiful wooden worktop against which to frame my pictures – it’s some manky plastic fake-marble stuff that I really dislike and swore that I wouldn’t buy a house with it in… Secondly I can’t be faffed with arranging stuff nicely in all the beautiful bowls and dishes that I have – I just want to get on with cooking. And finally, I make quite a lot of mess when I’m cooking, so the effort involved to tidy it up for glamorous shots of beautiful ingredients is a bit beyond me, especially if it’s the end of a long day at work.
We made Maria’s Marmalade Gingerbread on the weekend, so there was a little bit more time, but the photos are still highly unglamorous and set off nicely by the fake-marble laminate worktop. So…
The ingredients you need to make Maria’s Marmalade Gingerbread are: self-raising flour, butter, golden syrup, a jar of marmalade, an egg, ground ginger, ground cinnamon and a dash of milk.
the ingredients for maria's marmalade gingerbread
In a pan you melt the butter, golden syrup and the marmalade. It looks like this…
butter, golden syrup and marmalade melting
In a separate bowl sieve together the flour, ground ginger and ground cinnamon. Something like this…
sieve flour, ground ginger and cinnamon
When the syrupy-buttery-marmalade mixture has cooled slightly, add a beaten egg and a glug of milk and mix it well. Then you pour this into the flour mixture…
pour the wet mixture into the dry ingredients
…and fold it in…
fold it in
Finally you tip the mixture into a greased baking tin and bung it in the oven for half an hour or so. It is transformed from this…
before baking
to this…
baked
Ideas we had on how to eat it included a dollop of creme fraiche or a simple drizzled icing. Maria’s recipe recommends that it is best eaten after 3 days – N was very unhappy at this prospect so we made biscuits to get him through. The first taste will be tomorrow! Having tasted Maria’s a month ago we are eagerly anticipating it. Below you can find the full recipe which hopefully you will try and enjoy making.
Maria’s Marmalade Gingerbread
Serves 8-10
75g butter
150g golden syrup
225g marmalade
225g self-raising flour
4 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 egg, beaten
2 tbsp milk
Preheat your oven to 170°C.
Select your cake tin (Maria used a smaller tin than we did which produced a thicker gingerbread – we would do this next time). Grease it with a knob of butter and cut out a square of greaseproof paper to line the bottom.
In a saucepan, melt the butter, golden syrup and marmalade over a medium heat. Allow the mixture to cool a little.
In the meantime, sieve the flour, ginger and cinnamon into a bowl.
When the butter and syrup mixture has cooled a little, add the beaten egg and milk. Mix well and pour into the bowl with the dry ingredients. Use a spoon to fold it in.
Pour the mixture into your prepared cake tin and put in the oven for 30-50 minutes (this all depends on how thick the gingerbread will be). You can test the gingerbread to see if it’s ready by seeing if a skewer comes out clean.
Allow it to cool for about 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack.
This cake stores really well and is best eaten after three days – if you can wait that long!
Eat the Earth 
4 comments
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July 27, 2009 at 10:56 am
Two new wildlife additions to the garden « Eat the Earth
[…] called up my good friend Maria (or Maria’s Marmalade Gingerbread) to tell her about the mice – by coincidence, we went to there’s for dinner on Sunday […]
October 7, 2015 at 10:28 pm
Evidence Matters (@EvidenceMatters)
Just to say that I baked this today and have packed it up to mature for the recommended 3 days. It was a much stiffer batter than most gingerbread recipes and the overall volume was quite low so I shall be intrigued to see how this turns out.
I’ll look to serve the cake on Sunday and I’ll put a reminder in my calendar to let you know how it was.
October 14, 2015 at 12:52 am
Evidence Matters (@EvidenceMatters)
Reporting back on the matured Marmalade Gingerbread to say that it was well received 🙂 Good texture (despite my misgivings about the stiffness of the batter); pleasantly punchy flavour from the ginger; the marmalade was a clean flavour contrast and it will be interesting to experiment with several varieties to assess the difference that it makes.
So – thank you to you and to your friend Maria!
February 22, 2017 at 3:42 pm
Chumble
I have a very similar recipe, and having also tried it with gluten free flour I can confirm that it’s almost indistinguishable from the wheat-flour version, especially if you make the batter a little runnier (my recipe uses warm water instead of milk).
Try topping it with a thickish combination of sieved icing sugar and lemon juice. Turn the cooled cake onto a board with plenty of margin round the sides for the icing to trickle down onto, and smooth on the icing with the back of a spoon. It takes a while to set, but you can test the consistency at intervals by scraping up one of the overflowed “puddles” of icing.
On one occasion I forgot to include the baking powder and produced a solid but still very tasty result which wasn’t at all bad with custard!
It certainly keeps well for several days, if you can avoid eating it for that long….