Gloverly Cupcakes

As it’s Father’s Day today, I couldn’t resist baking a special cake for my Dad as a present. He loves pies, so I thought I would have a go at making a cake and turning it into a pie! I used Pinterest to look for a few ideas and found a great cake made by Clinton’s Cakes with chips, peas and a red and white chequed table cloth. I wanted to make a cake that would keep well for a week and also be one of my Dad’s and hubby’s favourite flavours, so I chose a sticky ginger cake recipe that I have made a couple of times before. Click 

The recipe is adapted from the BBCGoodFood website and can be found here.

Gluten Free Sticky Stem Ginger Cake – Serves 12

225g Gluten Free self-raising flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tbsp ground ginger

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp ground mixed spice

115g butter, cut into cubes, plus extra for greasing

115g dark muscovado sugar

115g black treacle

115g golden syrup

250ml whole milk

85g drained stem ginger, finely grated

1 egg

Preheat the oven to fan 160C/conventional 180C/gas 4. Butter and line an 18cm round, 7cm deep cake tin with greaseproof or parchment paper.

Put the flour, bicarbonate of soda and all the spices into a large mixing bowl. Add the butter and rub it into the flour with your fingertips until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.

Put the sugar, treacle, syrup and milk in a medium saucepan and heat, gently stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Turn up the heat and bring the mixture to just below boiling point.

Add the stem ginger to the flour mixture, then pour in the treacle mixture, stirring as you go with a wooden spoon. Break in the egg and beat until all the mixture is combined and it resembles a thick pancake batter. Pour this into prepared tin and bake for 50 minutes-1 hour, until a skewer pushed into the centre of the cake comes out fairly clean.

Leave to cool completely in tin before turning cake out. (To freeze: wrap in grease proof paper, then in cling film. Freeze for up to 1 month.)

I sliced the cake into 3 layers and sandwiched it together with vanilla butter cream and lightly covered the outside of the cake with butter cream before covering with sugar paste. I baked the cake in the bottom half of a giant cupcake mould which gave the perfect pie shape. I had a lot of fun using my airbrush to spray the chips and pastry to make it more realistic. I am sure we will all be enjoying a slice later this afternoon with a cup of tea!