Sticky Ginger Upside Down Persimmon Cake

I’ve been wanting to make a sticky ginger cake for a while now.  I like the warming effect of ginger in the colder months and always gravitate towards these ingredients in autumn/winter.  I think most people do.  

I scoured my cookbooks for the perfect recipe and settled on this one from Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries.  This is my first book by this author and I’m really enjoying his style of writing and cooking.  I adapted the recipe by bumping up the cinnamon (naturally) from ½ a teaspoon to 1 teaspoon, omitting the sultanas and using buttermilk instead of milk.  I also wanted to make this into an upside down cake with persimmons (or sharon fruit as we call it in my family) as I believed the flavours of ginger and the fruit would go well together.   

I really don’t think the fruit added anything to the whole at all.  It just seemed to get lost and become completely irrelevant within the strong sweet taste of this ginger cake.  Or maybe I should have cut the slices a lot thicker so the fruit had more ‘presence’ (nobody noticed the fruit while eating until I actually pointed it out to them!).   

Next time I might try apples and cut them a lot thicker.

The recipe doesn’t use any fresh ginger but instead relies on ground and stem ginger, the latter of which I prefer over fresh ginger.  I feel the candied sweetness of stem ginger is just more appropriate in sweet baked goods.

The smell emanating from the syrup and sugar mixture was heavenly!  

I could seriously bathe in this stuff!  This is the smell you want to come home to after a long day at work or school – so warm, sweet and comforting.

Sticky Ginger Upside Down Persimmon Cake

·         250g self-raising flour

·         2 tsp ground ginger

·         1 tsp cinnamon

·         1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

·         Pinch of salt

·         200g golden syrup

·         2 tbsp syrup from stem ginger jar

·         125g butter

·         2-4 lumps stem ginger, diced finely

·         125g dark muscavado sugar

·         2 large eggs

·         250ml buttermilk

·         1 persimmon, sliced finely (or 2 persimmons and sliced slightly thicker so it gets noticed)

Preheat oven to 180C, prepare a 9” round cake tin by lining and greasing it.  Arrange the persimmon slices at the bottom in a roughly concentric pattern.

Combine the flour, ground ginger, cinnamon, bicarbonate of soda and salt in a large mixing bowl.

Place the golden syrup, ginger syrup and butter on a medium-low heat to melt.  Add the diced stem ginger and sugar and let it bubble for about 1-2 minutes.

Mix the eggs and buttermilk together.  Remove the butter mix from the heat and pour into the flour mixture.  Stir until thoroughly combined, then add in the egg mixture.  The batter should be a fairly liquid consistency.

Pour into the prepared tin and bake for about 40 minutes (checking after 30 minutes to see if it’s done).  If it passes the skewer test then it is done, otherwise give it another 10 minutes or so.

Next time I will try making this cake with spelt flour or a combination of spelt and plain as I think it will work very well.