Baking Rundown

All Nigella recipes, from How to be a Domestic Goddess.

Coffee & Walnut Splodge Cookies: Going to add chocolate chips next time, and cut out the salt because I always use salted butter. (I find that things are a wee bit too bland with unsalted, especially bread. And it's too much of a hassle to keep two kind on hand.)

Gingerbread: Too sweet, not gingery enough, and the lemon icing needs a much higher sugar-to-lemon-juice ratio, or it's a glaze and not icing. However, the sticky English texture is very good, and you can tell the cake base is tasty. It called for two teaspoons of fresh grated ginger; I like my ginger things very gingery so I may make that two tablespoons instead. The icing, while not thick enough, can easily be made so by tweaking the proportions, and the lemon is a lovely offset to the ginger. I will make this again, too, with adjustments.

Christmas Morning Muffins: They're cranberry/orange muffins with a cinnamon sugar topping, and they are fan-freakin'-tastic. Also, easy. I probably will make these for me on Christmas morning as suggested. (Well, more likely Christmas afternoon, since I will have been up very late the night before and we don't do anything on Christmas Day.) This required no tweaking whatsoever.

So I had a friend over for tea today and she was a guinea pig. She too likes gingery things very spicy, and she agreed on all counts on the gingerbread. It's not horrible, but it's sooooooooo sweet than even I, who can handle a sweet, think it's too much. Thankfully that's easily fixed since the hardest thing about this recipe was just grating some ginger. No biggie.

I remember reading in one of Laurie Colwin's books about her search for the perfect gingerbread. She was a fan of the damp English kind, too, apparently. I should dig that book out.