This Jamaican gingerbread is loaded with flavor!
Spicy ginger kick from the trio of fresh, ground and crystallized ginger.
Plus intense color and deep flavor from unsulphured blackstrap molasses. Best of all, it’s easy to make! Left for a few days it tastes even better but it’s so irresistible that you might have to make two and hide one away from yourself for later.
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The Best Jamaican Gingerbread Loaf
This gingerbread loaf is a family favorite and the same one I made on Food Network’s Holiday Baking Championship.
Webster and I love to have it warm right out of the oven with butter. We’ve also have it smeared with ackee (naturally! 😆). If I can hide a slice away, I then like to reheat it by pan searing it with a little butter in a nonstick pan. The edges get a little crispy and makes it so good!
For me what makes this the best gingerbread recipe is how easily it can be transformed.
Want a decadent treat? You can prick the loaf several times while still warm out of the oven and drench it with sticky toffee sauce. Alternately, you could bake it in a muffin tin instead and make individual desserts. Cut the tops off (mmmmm snacks) and serve the muffins bottom side up drenched with toffee sauce and a scoop of ice cream. Add rum flambéed mango and crystalized ginger to take it to the next level!
If you bake a loaf you can also finish it with a variety of glazes. For this version I just made a plain glaze using icing sugar and a bit of milk. Different extracts or splashes of liqueur can make for an additional layer of flavour. If you want even more ginger flavour for example, you could use a bit of ginger juice in your glaze and top the cake.
Triple Ginger
I purchased the crystalized ginger for this recipe from Nuts.com. This is the same site from which I buy my vegetable powders like the beet one used to tint the pears. Usually I can find the crystalized ginger strips in my local grocery store. But when I found these I was very excited. We would get them in at a bakery I worked at but they would always be in huge quantities. The way they are from nuts is a time saver for me and I LOVE efficiency. Aside from being great for baking, when I need to make ginger tea on the fly I just add a few of these bits to some hot water.
I am contemplating making my own candied ginger in syrup often called stem ginger. I figure if I put that in my glaze (or batter) then it would become quadruple ginger gingerbread although it doesn’t have as nice a ring to it as triple. In more obsessive ginger thoughts, I also considered adding ginger extract and juice somewhere in the batter. But whilst I’m thinking all of this; the soft still voice remains steady and insistent: keep it simple! Leave it alone.
Jamaican Gingerbread Stuffed with Poached Pears
In the challenge, we were required to stuff our cakes with another dessert and my ingredient that I had to use was pear. I poached the pears in a syrup made from ginger beer along with cardamom, cinnamon sticks and fresh ginger. Alternately, you could poach pear slices and make a pear upside down gingerbread cake.
If memory serves, I used Anjou pears for the challenge, but this time around went with Seckel pears just because they are so cute!
I didn’t bother coring them, since they were so small but it would be a good idea since they do have seeds. We just ate around them, no big deal.
Poaching pears is easy and you don’t need a recipe but rather the basic idea.
The most important thing to note is to use firm pears since they will just become mush if they were soft to start with. You want a flavorful poaching syrup and for this recipe you don’t want the pears to become too soft since they will be baked for close to an hour.
Here is a good tutorial on poaching pears.
How to make Jamaican Gingerbread
So the breakdown goes like this:
First up, get your ingredients measured and ready.
I suggest lining up the pears in the baking dish to make sure they will fit before poaching. After poaching the pears move on to making the batter.
After the batter is made, pour it into the dish and then push the pears in.
To be very honest, I don’t usually garnish cakes for home unless I’m testing out a particular technique or finish. Being in the competition however, got me into the decorate decorate decorate mode. I think candied fruit slices are an elegant way to finish desserts. And since pears were inside of the gingerbread, having them on top is a nice preview of what’s to come.
For the glaze, I sifted about 2 cups of icing sugar into a bowl. Then added milk a couple tablespoons at a time until I got a consistency I liked. Once the loaf was cool, I drizzled the glaze on top of the loaf before placing the pears.
How to make candied pear slices
- Slice the pears on a mandolin leaving the stem in tact
- Combine equal parts of sugar and water (about a cup each). I added a tablespoon of this beet powder to tint the slices. You could also use red food coloring.
- Place the sugar and water in a shallow pot (I used my small nonstick frying pan)
- Bring to a boil, stir till the sugar melts.
- Turn down to a simmer and slide in the pear slices (it may be necessary to do this in batches
- Watch the pears closely as this won’t take more than 2 to 3 minutes. Let them simmer and when they start to look translucent. Remove them from the simmering syrup and place on a parchment sheet. Try to get off as much of the syrup as possible but be careful as they will be quite delicate at this point.
- Repeat till you have used up all your pear slices.
- Leave them to dry. I put them in my oven on its lowest setting (about 160F) for two hours till they dried out slightly. (I wanted them to be a bit chewy, almost like fruit leather and not quite a chip but you could leave if for longer if you wanted a crisp/chip). To ensure even drying I flipped them after an hour but they probably would have been fine even I had left them alone.
I painted some gold lustre dust onto some of the slices to create interest. I also made some sugared rosemary but then thought putting it on top would overpower the whole thing so it ended up laid on the side of the board 😆
All in all it was a fun recreation of one of our favorites.
So what do you think? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.
If you give this or any of the recipes on this site a try. Be sure to snap a pic @amazingackee or #amazingackee so I can see your posts across social media.
Until next time, thanks for stopping by 😊
Triple Ginger Jamaican Gingerbread Recipe
Ingredients
- 1/2 Cup Molasses*
- 2/3 C Sugar dark brown
- 1/2 C Butter
- 1 Cup Milk whole
- 2 Eggs
- 2 1/2 Cups Flour All purpose
- 1/2 tsp Salt
- 2 tsp Baking powder
- 1 tsp Baking soda
- 2 tsp Ginger powder
- 1/4 tsp Nutmeg
- 1/8 tsp Cardamom ground
- 2 tsp Fresh Ginger-root**
- 1/2 Cup Ginger crystallized***
Optional
- Poached Pears if making stuffed
- Toffee sauce if sticky sauce is desired
Instructions
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Preheat oven to 325F. Grease and flour or grease and line a 9x5x2 loaf pan
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Combine molasses, sugar and butter in a small pot. Place over low heat, warming till butter is completely melted. Set aside to cool briefly
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Whisk together the milk and eggs and set aside
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In a large bowl, sift together all the dry ingredients except the crystalized ginger
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Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients then pour in the molasses mixture and milk mixture.
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Stir in the crystalized and fresh ginger. Then pour into prepared pan****. If stuffing the gingerbread, place the poached pears into the batter at this point.
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Bake for 50 mins or till a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean or yielding very few crumbs
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Let cool (or enjoy warm). The loaf keeps for up to a week if well wrapped and kept in an airtight container at room temperature. You can also store it in the fridge. Alternately you can wrap it well and place it in the freezer.
Recipe Notes
*I use blackstrap molasses. You can use half and half molasses with golden syrup or honey or maple syrup
**Whenever I buy ginger I wash and scrub it clean, then keep it in the freezer. I eyeball the amount, roughly 2 tsps sometimes more but never less
***This diced crystallized ginger saves you the time of chopping it up yourself
****I did not have a problem with overflow on the show or when I baked this at home, it could be that my loaf pan is slightly larger. Fill your pan 2/3s full, whatever batter remains can be used to bake a muffin or sample size.
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