Easy Gingerbread Traybake Cake

5 from 9 votes

Easy Gingerbread Traybake Cake

All the wonderful sticky, spicy, deliciousness of a classic old-fashioned gingerbread cake… in a handy traybake form – easy to cut and perfect for sharing! Keep this Easy Gingerbread Traybake Cake traditional and leave it un-iced, or drizzle with a simple lemon icing and scatter with stem ginger for an easy peasy wow factor!

Course Cake, Dessert, Snack

Cuisine American, British

Prep Time 20 minutes

Cook Time 40 minutes

Total Time 1 hour

Servings slices

Calories 275kcal

Author Eb Gargano

Ingredients

Easy Gingerbread Traybake Cake

150 g butter
225 g golden syrup
225 g black treacle
500 g plain (all-purpose) flour
8 teaspoons ground ginger
3 teaspoons mixed spice (or gingerbread spice, or pumpkin spice)
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 teaspoons baking soda (see Note 1)
175 ml milk
4 eggs
125 g dark muscovado sugar
2 oranges juice and zest

Decoration

250 g icing (confectioners) sugar
Juice of 1 lemon
100 g crystalised (candied) ginger (optional)

Metric - US Customary

Instructions

Easy Gingerbread Traybake Cake

Grease and line a 33cm by 23cm (13ins by 9ins) cake pan (see tips above) and preheat your oven to 180C / 160C fan/ gas mark 4 / 350F.
Place the butter, golden syrup and treacle in a pan. Cook over a low heat until the butter is just melted.
Meanwhile, place the flour, ginger, mixed spice, nutmeg and baking soda in a large bowl and stir together until thoroughly combined.
Next, whisk together the milk and eggs in a jug.
As soon as the butter has melted, remove the pan from the heat and add the dark muscovado sugar.
Pour the butter/sugar mixture into the bowl containing the flour and spices, and stir everything together.
Next, pour the eggs/milk mixture into the bowl containing the flour, spices, butter etc. and stir until thoroughly combined.
Finally stir in the juice and zest of the two oranges.
Tip the mixture into your prepared cake pan (it should be quite runny and have little bubbles on the surface). Then pop it straight into your preheated oven.
Cook for 40-45 minutes until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. (Use a teaspoon handle if you don’t have a skewer.)
When done, remove the cake from the oven and leave it to cool for 10 minutes in the tin,. Then lift it out onto a cooling rack, using the baking paper to help you.
Either eat the gingerbread warm, or leave to cool completely before wrapping it up, first in a layer of baking paper, then a layer of tin foil. Wrapped like this the cake will keep for up to 2 weeks.
Alternatively decorate the cooled cake, as per the instructions below.

Decoration

**Do not try to decorate the cake until it is completely cold!**
Start by cutting up the stem ginger (if using), into ½cm / ¼inch cubes.
Next, sieve the icing sugar into a bowl and add the lemon juice slowly until you have a thick paste. It should be quite thick, but still spreadable. (If after adding all the lemon juice, your icing is still too thick, add some cold water, 1 teaspoonful at a time, until you get the desired consistency.)
Using a tablespoon, drizzle the icing over the cake in a zigzag pattern to achieve the graffiti effect.
Finally, scatter over the cubed stem ginger.
Cut the cake into 24 pieces and serve.

Video

Notes

You can use baking soda or bicarbonate of soda (they are the same thing), however don't use baking powder as this is not the same thing!
Suitable for freezing (if un-iced).
Nutrition information is approximate and meant as a guideline only.

Nutrition