Nothing says Christmas quite like gingerbread right? We love ginger and all things gingery here at the Brampton Inn. In fact, we make ginger snap cookies all year long for our afternoon tea, not just in the fall and winter. When I first came to work here (over 6 years ago, now!) I thought that was wrong, that the cookies were more special if they were only available at a certain time of the year.
It turns out our ginger cookies are the most requested cookie recipe. Boy, was I was wrong. Man, are they good.
So clearly, lots of people like ginger. And ginger cookies. And gingerbread. Almost everyone loves chocolate, but have you ever thought of putting them together? Have you come across any Gingerbread and Chocolate recipes? I hadn’t, and one day I reached into the fridge for what I thought was a chocolate ganache covered brownie. I took a bite (quality control has its perks!) and quickly realized it was a gingerbread square topped with chocolate and little bits of chopped candied ginger. It was delicious! And I couldn’t get over it; why hadn’t I thought of that?? The perfect gingerbread, to me, is moist, not overly sweet, and has the peppery bite of ginger. A slick glaze of dark chocolate is the perfect foil.
After another bite, and then another… I started thinking of some other ways to combine these flavors. A quick Google search revealed that many others were way ahead of me: lots of chocolate gingerbread recipes, most with the chocolate baked right in. I liked the fact that ours was a regular gingerbread cake with the chocolate on top. Makes it easier to offer the cake both ways. I guess there must be some purists out there who prefer the classic lemon curd accompaniment, or just a glass of egg nog!
Anyway, I found a cake recipe at Epicurious (love that site!) that intrigued me because it had freshly brewed coffee in it. There is a cake from an old Moosewood cookbook that has been my go-to chocolate cake for about 25 years now, and it is also made with brewed coffee. So I wasn’t surprised when this one came out really moist and delicious.
And here it is all tarted up with a glaze of chocolate ganache and some flashy bits of crystallized ginger.
Another idea is to make little ginger-chocolate oreo type cookies. There was some gingerbread cookie dough in the fridge, as well as some chocolate ganache. Next thing you know, a new cookie was born!
So the moral of this story is this: don’t be afraid to mess around with flavors and tweak your normal recipes every so often. Adding chocolate almost never hurts, right?
You never know: What you come up with may turn out to be a new favorite!