2025 Release of the Bakehouse’s Seasonal Gingerbread Cake
Another great baked good made better still by better butter
To pull together the pursuit of pennies, last week’s essay on generosity, and the paragraphs that follow, I’ll share a line from the one and only William Shakespeare’s late-16th-century play Love’s Labour’s Lost:
And I had but one penny in the world. Thou should’st have it to buy gingerbread.
Though it will cost you far more than a penny apiece, the Bakehouse’s Gingerbread Cake is very well worth it—at least to my ginger-loving taste buds. It is, by far, one of my favorites amongst the many hundreds, probably thousands, of great products we make, serve, and sell. If you want a cake that delivers at the world-class level of Shakespeare, this is the one.
In case you’re one of the few folks who hasn’t yet heard, we have begun using the remarkably delicious Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter in more and more of our Bakehouse pastries. Between the Bakehouse and the Roadhouse, the cultured butter has now been effectively and deliciously incorporated into about two dozen different items. Each of them was already a great product but has been made markedly better still by the excellence of the butter. Bakehouse scones and Sour Cream Coffee Cakes, as well as Roadhouse Buttermilk Biscuits and Butterscotch Pudding, are a few of the products benefiting from being made with better butter!
The Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter, as I’ve been saying, is made as great butter would have been made up until the end of the 19th century. High-quality cream is allowed to ripen so the natural bacteria develop their flavor just as they would in yogurt, cheese, the chorizo I wrote about last week, and even sourdough bread. Modern butters are nearly all what is now known as “sweet butter,” which is a lovely though slightly deceptive way to describe something that actually has less flavor than its cultured cousin.
The Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter is so good that almost every day I talk to someone who has made it the regular butter at their house. And I just placed an order this week to ship a loaf of Roadhouse bread and a one-pound tube of the cultured butter to a friend as a small thank-you gift. (The Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter is not on Mail Order’s website. Just email us at [email protected], and we’ll happily ship you some!)
If you want to make it at home, the recipe for the Gingerbread Cake is on page 177 in the newest Bakehouse cookbook, Celebrate Every Day. If you flip to that page, you’ll see that, as with almost everything at Zingerman’s, the high quality of the ingredients contribute a lot to the flavor. Amy Emberling, co-managing partner of the Bakehouse, adds:
The process for making gingerbread is quite simple. It’s a one-bowl quick cake. What makes ours particularly good, I think, is the combination of ingredients that add many layers to the flavor—brewed Zingerman’s Coffee Company coffee, hot mustard, Indonesian long pepper, crystallized ginger, and orange juice. It actually takes more time to measure all of the ingredients than it does to make the cake!
Add in lots of cultured butter, organic flour, and fresh eggs. They all come together to make a dark, mysterious, marvelously gingery flavor that seems to appeal to almost all ages and taste preferences.
Be sure to let the cake breathe for 20 to 30 minutes after you open its plastic package. One of my favorite bits about the Bakehouse’s Gingerbread Cake is that with a bit of contact with the air, it gets this really thin sheen of a sugar crust on the outside, sort of like that very first bit of the ice crystals that form on the lakes this time of year. It ships well, too, so it makes a very good gift for a friend, relative, or business connection you’re trying to impress. The cake is great on its own at any time of the day. Delicious with Zingerman’s vanilla gelato. Or with some of that wonderful Roadshow Butterscotch Syrup. If you’re in the same camp as longtime Mail Order marketer Brad Hedeman, you’ll happily spread some additional cultured butter on your slice of coffee cake!
Get your gingerbread
