Gingerbread

Two days of exams remain, and it's getting to us. You know your brain is shot when you can watch the three-hour season finale of Survivor without realizing it. That happened. But some good came out of our study lapse as well -- in the form of a sweetly moist and richly-flavored gingerbread loaf.

We were all set to bake ourselves a cake, but the second we found this recipe we knew it had to be. Like when you walk into a party with one person, but fall in love at first sight with another and ditch the first. It's not that you didn't like them, it's just that the alternative looked SO much better. Gingerbread recipe: You had us at ... something. Butter? The best part was that at the end of the night, we knew we made the right choice. Our mouths watered at the aroma, and it tasted perfectly spiced and festive.

The recipe is from 101 Cookbooks, which posts amazingly-adapted recipes from a vast cookbook collection. We love it. We wish we had that many cookbooks. We modified the recipe again slightly, owing to what we had around the kitchen. I'm posting exactly what we did below, but check out the original recipe here.

Ingredients:
1 cup unsalted butter
1/2 cup water
3/4 cup dark molasses
3/4 cup honey
1 cup dark brown sugar
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground allspice (we ground ours with the mortar and pestle!)
3 large eggs,
1/2 cup milk (1 percent)
1 tbsp fresh ginger root, grated

Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 325. Lightly grease 9 x 9 baking pan and line the bottom with a piece of parchment paper, cut to hang over two opposite edges. Combine butter, water, molasses, honey and brown sugar in a medium saucepan and place over low heat. Stir until the butter is melted and ingredients are combined, then pour into a large bowl and set aside. Combine flour, baking soda, salt, ginger, cinnamon and all-spice and set aside. When the molasses mixture feels warm to the touch, add the eggs one at a time and beating well. Add the milk and stir to combine. Fold the dry ingredients into the batter a bit at a time. Stir in the grated ginger. Pour the batter into the pan and bake in the centre of the oven for 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours, or a knife inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool for 15 minutes, remove from the pan using the parchment. Cool entirely before cutting.