We finished our Christmas cake a few days ago and since we’re not doing a clean/dry/healthy January or whatever it is we’re supposed to do, I decided to bake a cake yesterday, the first baking I’ve done since before the festive season.  When I asked my youngest what he’d like, he didn’t hesitate: the ginger cake from the Nordic Bakery Cookbook, a gift to me from his big brother.  I’m half Norwegian, which makes the boys a quarter Norwegian, and we all love the recipes in this book.  Actually, our youngest has baked more from it than I have, and very successfully.

Since I last made the ginger cake (in an 8″ tin), I’ve bought the correct sized (7″) tin, which is the one I used yesterday.  I knew the cake would therefore be deeper and I’d need to make sure it was cooked in the middle.  At the end of the allotted time, the skewer came out clean, so I knew it was cooked through, but as you can see in the photos, I was WRONG.  As I turned it over the middle began to ooze out, creating, to much wailing by me, a massive sink hole.  How could this be?   One explanation is that I inserted the skewer at an angle and somehow missed the middle, but I don’t really believe this.  Nor do I think it has anything to do with the timing adjustments one has to make for Aga cooking because I’ve got used to that now and nothing like this has happened before.  Mind you, that’ll teach me to think smugly that I might write a blog in which I pass on cooking tips and recipes to fellow Aga owners.  Rest assured though, I will not rest until the mystery is solved and I WILL be having another go at this one.

Apart from the middle, which I scooped into the bin, the cake was absolutely fine, so when my son came home from school, I put the kettle on and we laughed at my mishap.   Oh, and ate some cake.