HCB: English Gingerbread Cake

I was looking forward to this cake. I've never had proper gingerbread before (since it's English, it must be proper, no? :)). I'm also looking forward to the opportunity to use my stash of golden syrup that I purchased from Amazon.

The cake is also very easy to make. I'm really liking all the easy cakes at the end of this bake through. It helps me mentally because now I'm thinking, "okay yeah, after this easy one, I have x number left. YEAH!! (raising fists up in the air)."

The cake starts off really interesting, first combine the golden syrup, brown sugar, and butter mixture in a pan and heat up on the stove until the sugar and butter melted. I'm not sure if I took the mixture a bit too far because the butter started browning a bit and started smelling like beurre noisette. I don't know if that's Rose's intention - it wasn't clear in the book. In any case, it looked fine to me so I proceeded.

beautiful golden goodness

After it cooled down a bit, add the egg.

Next combine the rest of the dry ingredients and add the syrup mixture to it. I love that I can do this all in a mixing bowl, without using the machine.

Here is the batter. It's amazing to me how runny it is.

While the cake is baking, I made the syrup.

In the oven, the batter magically transform from that very liquid-y mixture to a cake! Baking magic!

I love how golden it is.

Want a slice?

Tasting impressions:
It is very good. I added extra ginger so it's pretty ginger-y. It is pretty sweet, a bit too sweet for my taste and it's mostly because of the syrup. I know it's the syrup because only the top and bottom part of the cake is too sweet for me. The middle part was fine. Sooo.. I mostly ate the middle part. Mostly not the appropriate word here though as it's hubby who ate most of the cake :))).