yumyumbakery21
- Dec 16, 2021
- 2 min read

Gingerbread Cake!

A classic Christmas tradition is the baking, building, and decorating of gingerbread houses. If I'm honest, I am not a fan. Now-a-days of course there are pre-made gingerbread houses, so people don’t have to deal with the hassle of gingerbread dough and molds. I remember growing up making them with my mom. It’s not the worst, but it takes so long, and attempting to take them out of the molds without breaking them, is just a delight (sarcasm).

I do like ginger flavor, so I found a gingerbread cake with a delicious caramel buttercream to bake. It was my mom's birthday recently, and she enjoys ginger (at least I'm quite confident she does), so I decided to make this cake for her. It’s a three tiered cake, smothered with caramel buttercream, with buttercream layers in between the cake. It's really, really good you guys.

I needed three 8" round cake pans. I have two and one 9", so I figured I could use the 9" for the base. It didn't work out so well, but it could've been worse. Definitely not the most uniform cake I've made haha. The cake itself is quite straightforward and filled with spices that make you feel the holidays. The ginger flavor stands out but isn't overwhelming. The cake is pretty dense but not too heavy that you feel like you can’t finish one piece. I baked all the cake tiers at once without issues.

I did have issues with the buttercream. I had major problems making the caramel, which frustrated me to no end. I make caramel relatively often and have never had issues with it hardening midway, which happened twice. Because of this, the first round didn't make enough caramel for the buttercream. It was an underwhelming caramel flavor. I made a second batch and had the same hardening problem, but added all of it to the buttercream. Guess what happened? It made the buttercream too thin.

Frustrated as I was at this point, I decided to just go with it; it was a messy process frosting the cake, but it worked out. I could have added more buttercream to the first in between layer; I was worried about running out, and go figure I had a lot leftover. Hindsight is 20/20 or whatever that saying is.

Overall, I would definitely make this cake again; it’s a wonderful holiday cake and is quite different from your typical cranberry, pumpkin, apple desserts, and much more palatable in my opinion than gingerbread houses or cookies. I don’t know why I dont like to eat those, but I would eat this cake on repeat!