Ginger Bread Recipe

This is a curious recipe in the sense that it’s not about making a traditional gingerbread cookie, but making a bread with ginger as an ingredient resulting in a “Ginger” bread. In actual fact, this is a cake or ”batter” bread. You can always tell a batter bread because it uses baking soda and/or baking powder in place of yeast. You also have an option with the ginger flavor. You can use fresh ginger that has been peeled, sliced and processed to a mash in a food processor, or you can use powdered, ground ginger from a jar if you don’t have fresh ginger on hand or don’t want to add the processing step to the recipe. Both approaches yield a good ginger flavor although the fresh ginger approach delivers a slightly stronger ginger flavor-note to the bread. For this recipe, you can either use the cake bread setting if your machine has one, or you can use the pasta dough or pizza dough setting to make the batter and finish it in the oven. Unlike yeast breads, batter breads don’t rise before baking. That’s why you don’t use the usual dough setting. The standard dough setting has a rise cycle that’s not needed for a batter bread. They rise in the machine or in the oven towards the end of the baking cycle. This bread is great at breakfast or at tea-time with a cup of tea or coffee. It also serves as a great dessert especially around the holidays.