cake weather

I used to live near a bakery that made what I considered a perfect gingerbread: damp in nature and sticky on top but definitely cake and not pudding. They served it with whipped cream, as they definitely should have, and I have been trying to recreate it ever since.

For a while Laurie Colwin’s version stood in but despite having ‘damp’ right in its name and despite my wholehearted devotion to Laurie Colwin, I truly found it a bit dry. If the link above is your first introduction to Laurie Colwin, happy trails to you on the rabbit hole and you’re welcome. I think about her, and hear her voice in my kitchen, every day.

For many subsequent years, I used a recipe from an old issue of Fine Cooking magazine, its pages now stained almost beyond legibility by way of proof, but it also lost its luster for me, perhaps right around the time I stopped being able to comfortably eat wheat.

Cold weather (which presently abounds in my zip code, though it will probably be 50 degrees again next Tuesday) always makes me think of this kind of cake, so recently I set about trying to make a new version I could eat. I also set about determining if some forms of wheat are things I can tolerate; I’ve heard enough people with non-celiac gluten intolerance tell me that they can eat it when they travel outside this country to suspect that there was more to the story for me than rice crackers 4evah.  

Einkorn seems to be the answer, at least for the moment. It’s an ancient, non-hybridized strain of wheat and it is conveniently cup-for-cup interchangeable with all-purpose flour. I tinkered around with a few recipes and came up with what is, for me, the perfect gingerbread cake: spicy, tender and a dessert-positive item that is healthy enough to eat responsibly for breakfast. Like all the recipe content lately, you’ll find the details posted over on Rural Intelligence.