Cake #10 - Chocolate Covered Gingerbread Cake by Mindy

Thank goodness for an easy cake! Huzzah and hooray. I was able to bake this cake after Christmas Eve dinner while my mother very helpfully wrapped all the Christmas presents that needed to be put under the tree for Christmas morning. The cake cooled overnight, and then on Christmas morning I only had to make the ganache.

Unlike Sherie, I had the correct pan, and I also had ground cloves. Like Sherie, and since she bought molasses for the first time, she doesn't realize this, neither of us had "light molasses". I remember a Cooks Illustrated tasting thingy on molasses from a few years back, and Grandma's makes a "mild" version of molasses - I'm guessing that equals "light". Either way, I couldn't find it and used the molasses that I had on hand. Which was definitely not mild as you can see by the dark rich color in the picture below.

The super dark stuff is the molasses

As a result, the cake tasted more like a rich molasses cookie than gingerbread, which was okay by me. I love molasses cookies!

You know what I also love? This ganache/frosting. This might become my go-to frosting for cakes: whipping cream, butter, corn syrup, chocolate, vanilla. Melt it all together, let cool slightly and then pour on your cake. The result is a fudgy goodness of just the right thickness. Since frosting a cake is not my forte, this was perfect!

The finished product:
Yes, yes, it's missing the crystallized ginger. Truth be told, I don't care for crystallized ginger. I would have picked it off my portion of the cake. Rather than do that, I just left it off, and I don't think that the cake suffered without it.

I'm not sure that this cake will be made again, but I was totally happy with it. Which, given the chaos of Christmas, is a pretty great thing to be able to say.