Ginger and Treacle Spiced Traybake – Mary Berry Baking Bible

I thought I’d try another recipe from Mary Berry’s Baking Bible Mary Berry’s Baking Bible Jon loves ginger cake so I thought I’d give these a try, with half term holidays and teens exams I haven’t done much baking or new cooking the last couple of weeks. My main frustration with this recipe was my traybake tin is smaller but not enough that I wanted to recalculate all the ingredients as I went along. I would really like baking recipes to provide alternate quantities for different size tins!

Mary uses the all-in-one method a lot so these were easy to mix up. She suggests weighing the treacle on the sugar which is a handy trick that I’d worked out myself a few weeks ago but it’s good that she puts these tips in her recipes.

The conclusion was very positive. These are not overwhelmingly ginger, we like ginger so I will increase the amounts next time. I liked the icing but mine was a lovely golden colour from the ginger sugar syrup. Jon really doesn’t like icing so maybe I’d leave some uniced next time. Which would solve the problem of not enough icing. As I mentioned above my traybake tin was smaller that she specified but there wasn’t enough icing. I had to make up another 50g icing sugars worth.

Ingredients

• 225g (8 oz) softened butter
• 175g (6 oz) light muscovado sugar
• 200g (7 oz) black treacle
• 300g (11 oz) self-raising flour
• 2 level teaspoons baking powder
• 1 level teaspoon ground mixed spice
• 1 level teaspoon ground allspice
• 4 large eggs
• 4 tablespoons milk
• 3 finely chopped bulbs of stem ginger from a jar

For the Icing:

• 75g (3 oz) icing sugar
• 3 tablespoons stem ginger syrup from the jar
• 3 finely chopped bulbs of stem ginger from a jar

Instructions

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180˚C/Fan 160˚C/Gas 4. Grease a 30 x 23 cm (12 x 9 in) traybake or roasting tin then line the base with baking parchment.
2. Put all the ingredients for the traybake into a large bowl and beat until well blended. Turn the mixture into the prepared tin, scraping the bowl with a plastic spatula to remove all the mixture. Level the top gently with the back of the spatula.
3. Bake in the pre-heated oven for 35-40 minutes, or until the cake has shrunk from the sides of the tin and springs back when pressed in the centre with your fingertips. Leave to cool in the tin for a few minutes then turn out, peel off the parchment and finish cooling on a wire rack.
4. To make the icing, sift the icing sugar into a bowl, add the ginger syrup and mix until the icing is smooth and has a spreading consistency. Pour the icing over the cake, spread it gently to the edges with a small palette knife and sprinkle with the chopped stem ginger to decorate. Allow the icing to set before slicing the traybake into 15-20 pieces.

TIP: This traybake freezes very well un-iced, and in fact improves with freezing.