Miniature Gingerbread Cakes

I was invited to attend a Fall Baking potluck brunch last weekend, and I wanted to take something seasonal and festive. I had a feeling there would be a lot of apple and pumpkin treats, so I decided to be a rebel and make these gingerbread cakes. Aren't they cute? Ginger is one of my favorite foods, so this was perfect for me. This also gave me an opportunity to use my decorative mini-muffin tins for the first time. This means they were a good investment, right?

As usual, I used the recipe from my copy of Martha's Baking Handbook, but I think this is the identical recipe on Martha's web site.

I made some slight modifications to her original recipe. Her recipe calls for mixing together one cup of boiling water and 2 teaspoons baking soda, setting them aside, and then adding them into the batter as one of the final steps. I've never heard of doing this before. I spent some time searching the internet, trying to figure out what kind of magical chemical reaction occurs when you mix together boiling water and baking soda. I couldn't find anything useful related to cake baking (although I did find a lot of recipes for polishing silver). So, in my infinite wisdom, I decided to skip this step entirely. I added the baking soda to the rest of the dry ingredients, and instead of adding one cup of water to the batter, I substituted one cup of milk. I thought this would give the cakes a richer flavor. Did it work? Stay tuned....

First, I sifted together the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, spices) into a large bowl.

Then I creamed the butter and brown sugar together in my stand mixer.
See, nice and fluffy. I added molasses, freshly grated ginger (key ingredient!), eggs, and milk to the butter/sugar mixture. Then I added the flour mixture to the rest of the cake batter. When everything was mixed together, I poured the batter into my cute little cake tin. Correction: my heavily greased cute little cake tin. I was really worried about the batter sticking to my molds, so I used a lot of non-stick spray on these babies.

After 15 minutes in the oven, they were perfectly baked.

I carefully flipped over my cake tin, and they came out of the molds perfectly!

The recipe in Martha's book involves covering the tops of the cake with chocolate ganache. That sounds amazingly good, but I thought it would be a bit heavy for a brunch, so I decided to dust the tops of the cakes with powdered sugar instead. The sugar also emphasized the different shapes of each cake.

Perfect for the holidays! And so tasty, too. I really loved these. They have a very strong ginger flavor, which I love. They also freeze very well, if you wrap them up individually in plastic wrap.