For the next year I am doing a project - a different cake each week for an entire year - following the book All Cakes Considered: A Year's Worth of Weekly Recipes Tested, Tasted and Approved by the Staff of NPR's All Things Considered. You can read about the start of my project here and look at each week to date here.

The recipe: ATF Gingerbread


I was really looking forward to making this one even though this was the second gingerbread cake I was making in two weeks. The combination of crystallized ginger and dark beer really intrigued me. And as I mentioned last week, I'm a sucker for cream cheese frosting.

I'm actually a week ahead of my blog posts, just in case something comes up and I'm not able to bake a cake one week. I considered pushing this one off a week since my usual baking day fell in the middle of one of our heat waves and there was no way I was cooking a cake in 30+ degree heat. But we ended up moving to my parents (air-conditioned) place for a couple days so I decided to take advantage and bake it there. A little tricky since my mom, who is a great cook, doesn't like to bake and therefore doesn't own a stand mixer, but I made it work.

And I actually quite liked it when I first tried it. But Jim hated it. He though the chunks of ginger were weird and that it was way too gingery in general. And then I got to wondering if it was the cream cheese frosting that made me like eating it more than the taste of the actual cake.

Recipients: No one, since Jim's reaction to it was so negative. I was kind of scared of foisting the cake on anyone else.

Verdict: I think we've established it's weird. And not getting made again.

Up next: Chocolate Pound Cake