Medieval Gingerbread Cake

Some of you may be thinking 'Gingerbread isn't exactly dinner' and you'd be right. This came from the culmination of a tough day and the fact that my pear, which I was meant to use for dinner that night, was well and truly squished. You know, those days were things have already been rough, and then your partner finds you in the kitchen sobbing over your squashed pear? So rather than cook anything new, that night we had a multitude of leftovers, including the ember tart, pottage, chicken and bread. I appreciate I failed in doing another Medieval meal in the evening, so decided to make up for it by creating a soft gingerbread cake that makes use of all the favourites from the era (dates, honey, wine, powder douce). I'll also say, because who knows, it may be a concern, none of the ingredients (with the exception of the pear) will go to waste and will be used in future recipes. 

This one is a touch tricky, because of course there were no raising agents apart from yeast during the era, so I spent a good five minutes furiously beating eggs till they were light and fluffy. But again, this was an interesting endeavour, because I'd never actually made a cake before without any raising agents. It is a big part of why I am enjoying this challenge so much, because there's lots of recipes or ingredients I wouldn't have necessarily tried or bothered with if I thought they were overly complicated. Granted, sometimes I don't consider cheating a little bit a terrible offense, but it can be fun to try a completely different way of doing something and doing it in a way that would be familiar to the people from that era (sans the electric hand whisk)!

Gingerbread Cake

Ingredients

• 225g refined flour 
  
• 250g butter
• 4 eggs
• 200g sugar
• 100ml red wine
• 6-10 dates
• 100g currents
• 1tbsp honey
• 2 tbsp powder douce

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180C (160C fan).
2. Mix the red wine, powder douce, currants and honey in a bowl. Chop the dates and add to the bowl, leave to soak.
3. In a seperate, larger bowl break the eggs. Beat well with an electric beater for 8-10 minutes or till the mixture looks pale and fluffy.
4. In yet another bowl beat the butter and sugar.
5. In a blender whizz up the red wine, dates and current mix and slowly add it to the butter and sugar.
6. Add the flour into the butter and sugar with a seive, then add the egg mixture.
7. Mix using the cut and fold method, DO NOT use a handheld whisk to mix otherwise you will lose all the air bubbles.
8. Pour the mixture in greased cake tin.
9. Put cake tin in preheated oven and bake for 30 minutes. Check with toothpick, if it comes out clean then your cake is done. If not, cover with tin foil and leave to cook for another 10 minutes.

Now I don't know how accurate this cake is for the time period, but a wealthy lord certainly would have access to all the ingredients and also probably had access to a poor servant who could spend their time whipping up eggs! But with Christmas approaching and everything in the kitchen smelling vaguely of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves and wine what's not to like? It tastes amazing with a cup of coffee or hot chocolate if you want to be a little less Medieval!