Monday, February 25, 2013

Adventures with Chocolate: Ginger & Cardamom Tea Bread

First an apology.

I made this recipe for the February 2013 'We Should Cocoa' challenge and only as I was writing it up rather late in the day, on the last day of the challenge period, did I realise that it had been chosen before for a much earlier We Should Cocoa challenge. At that time the challenge was to combine chocolate with  tea, and this loaf was chosen by more than one person, so I am bringing nothing new to the party by presenting it here.



However, I loved this cake so much, and with no time left to do something different, I hope you will forgive the repetition.

Paul A Young's book is full of adventurous recipes and really lives up to its title.  This recipe for 'Chocolate Ginger and Cardamom Tea Bread' must be one of the most simple and most divine recipes in the whole book.  The recipe is based on a classic tea bread where the fruit is soaked overnight in good strong tea and then the loaf whipped together my mixing in the egg and the dry ingredients. The powerful but well balanced flavourings of orange zest and cardamom work beautifully with the depth of the Assam tea and chocolate and sweet spiciness of the ginger and raisins. The added bonus I felt was that despite having no added butter or oil the cake kept quite well for several days.

Here is my cake, almost finished now, but still looking very enticing (to a ginger and chocolate lover).


As I mentioned earlier this recipe has been blogged about before on We Should Cocoa and in the two fo the bloggers;  Using Mainly Spoons  and choclogblog, did detailed writes ups with their versions on the original recipe, so please pop over to their links if you have not got a copy of the book and fancy having a try at this one yourself.  I kept to the tea specified which is a strong Assam and used the full 250g of ginger. I used white flour and 2 level teaspoons of cardamom which seemed a lot of cardamom but it worked very well.

So here is the loaf straight out of the oven, while it was still too hot form me to slice into. I find it very hard to wait for any baked product to completely cool before I start sampling, bad habit I know but one that is hard to cure.
 
 
So rather apologetically this is my entry to We Should Cocoa - Ginger which this month is being hosted by bluekitchenbakes. You can find a list of all the submitted chocolate and ginger creations on Blue Kitchen Bakes web page.
 
The We Should Cocoa Blog Challenges are jointly run by Choclette of Chocolate Log Blog and Chele of Chocolate Tea Pot