STUDY BAKE

I'm not really sure how its happened so fast, but I'm almost in the middle of another university trimester, about to hit my first lot of assessments. As I spend time listening to my lectures online I find I have a serious inability to simply listen without doing something else at the same time (sadly, I think its a repercussion of being a generation-Yer).

However, the good news is, now we have a fresh-baked ginger cake for consumption this week. No complaints here. I love ginger, so much so that I may have quadrupled the amount required for this recipe, two teaspoons of ground ginger was hardly enough to call it a ginger cake in my opinion - so here's to hearty autumn flavours!

ingredients

3/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar

3/4 cup plain flour

1/2 cup self-raising flour

1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

2 teaspoons ground ginger (I used approx 3 tablespoons)

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (I used approx 1 tablespoon)

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

2 eggs

2/3 cup buttermilk

caramel icing

60g butter

1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar

2 tablespoons milk

3/4 cup icing sugar

1 Preheat oven to 170 °C (150°C fan-forced). Grease deep 20cm ring pan. (I used a 20cm cake pan).

2 Sift dry ingredients into medium bowl. Add remaining ingredients; beat with electric mixed on low speed until ingredients are combined. Increase speed to medium; beat about 2 minutes or until mixture is smooth and paler in colour.

3 Pour mixture into pan; bake about 35 minutes. Stand cake in pan 10 minutes before turning, top-side, onto wire rack to cool.

caramel icing Meanwhile, stir butter, sugar and milk in small saucepan over heat until sugar dissolves; bring to a boil then simmer, stirring, 2 minutes. Remove from heat, stir in sifted icing sugar. Drizzle warm icing over cake.