Personal

Car Stuff

Extras

Mary Berry's ginger and treacle spiced traybake

My mother used to make this recipe for tea – it was a great favourite. It started off as a Victoria sandwich with treacle and ginger icing, but I adapted it into a tray bake. I added stem ginger; my mum used to just use ginger powder.
From: 'Mary Berry’s Baking Bible’ by Mary Berry

225g (8oz) softened butter
175g (6oz) light muscovado sugar
200g (7oz) black treacle
300g (11oz) self-raising flour
2 level teaspoons baking powder
1 level teaspoon ground mixed spice
1 level teaspoon ground allspice
4 large eggs
4 tablespoons milk
3 finely chopped bulbs of stem ginger from a jar
For the icing:
75g (3oz) icing sugar
3 tablespoons stem ginger syrup from the jar
3 finely chopped bulbs of stem ginger from a jar

Pre-heat the oven to 180C/Fan 160C/Gas 4. Grease a 30x23 cm (12x9in) traybake or roasting tin, then line the base with baking parchment.

Put all the ingredients for the traybake into a large bowl and beat until well blended. Turn the mixture into the prepared tin, scraping the bowl with a plastic spatula to remove all the mixture. Level the top gently with the back of the spatula.

Bake in the pre-heated oven for 35–40 minutes, or until the cake has shrunk from the sides of the tin and springs back when pressed in the centre with your fingertips. Leave to cool in the tin for a few minutes then turn out, peel off the parchment and finish cooling on a wire rack.

To make the icing, sift the icing sugar into a bowl, add the ginger syrup and mix until the icing is smooth and has a spreading consistency. Pour the icing over the cake, spread it gently to the edges with a small palette knife and sprinkle with the chopped stem ginger to decorate. Allow the icing to set before slicing the traybake into 15–20 pieces.

Tips

Treacle can be difficult to weigh accurately, as it tends to stick to the scale pan. Weighing it on top of the sugar overcomes this problem. This traybake freezes very well un-iced, and in fact improves with freezing.