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Recipes/Fresh Gingerbread With Lemon Icing
Fresh Gingerbread With Lemon Icing

Fresh Gingerbread With Lemon Icing

Free online atnigella.com

I’ve been making this gingerbread since the turn of the century — it was one of my go-to recipes for the countless bake sales at my children’s schools when they were little — and my love for it never fades. The lemon icing is hardly conventional, but its bright sourness is a wonderful foil for the deep, dark spiciness of the cake. This is the gingerbread (minus said icing) I advise you to use for the Advocaat and Ginger Cake should you not want to go the shop-bought route, and when I use it in this capacity, I tend to use the 2 teaspoons of ground ginger rather than the teaspoon of freshly grated ginger-root, though you could certainly use either — or both, indeed. And while I cut it into slabs when serving it iced, if you’re using it to layer up in the cake, make 3 cuts down with the gingerbread in landscape, as it were, so that you have 4 equal sized little loaves, and then cut each loaf into 12 slices. And please read the Additional Information section at the end of the recipe before proceeding.

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