Spicy Gingerbread Cake

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Isn’t it funny how tastes change how our tastes change when we get older? Take beer and coffee. Both of them are prime examples of the kind of foods that we grow into liking. Remember in college, how girls used to wrinkle their nose and say “I don’t like the taste of beer”? Now a days, everybody I know is a beer connoisseur or some kind of coffee expert! I’ve seen friends of put away pints of super-hoppy double-IPAs, licking their lips with relish, when four years ago they couldn’t even handle the taste of Corona Light… too funny.

Gingerbread is one of those flavors and foods I kinda grew into — these days, I can’t get enough of its rich, complex flavor:

But let me tell you, I really hated gingerbread as a kid. My mother wasn’t a baker, so I remember being incredibly excited when I saw a pack of homemade gingerbread men at my fourth-grade bake sale. I wish I had a picture of the cookie — it was your quintessential gingerbread man, right down to the gumdrop buttons and white gel frosting. I’d never had a gingerbread cookie before, so I didn’t know what to expect. My fourth-grade self could barely contain my excitement at the cookie.

But then I bit into it. I almost immediately spat it out. What was this black magic? The cookie was, well, spicy — cookies weren’t supposed to be spicy — and didn’t taste at all like the chocolate chip cookies and Oreos that my fourth grade self always wanted. I guess that was the moment that traumatized me, because from that point on, I always avoided ginger-flavored desserts and baked goods.

It wasn’t until my time in San Francisco that I began to realize that ginger baked goods weren’t the root of all evil. My friend Matt and I sometimes went to Chow, a restaurant in the Castro neighborhood known for its mediocre food, but fabulously gorgeous waiters. Although I enjoyed our eye candy, I always left the restaurant particularly wanting. Until I tried their signature dessert, ginger cake with salted caramel and pumpkin ice cream. It was then that I realized how good ginger cake could be — dark, spicy, and complex, perfectly complemented by the sweetness of the caramel and pumpkin.

And this gingerbread cake is all those things:

I didn’t succeed in finding Chow’s recipe online, so I went ahead and chose a recipe from another one San Francisco’s famous and beloved staples: a bakery called Miette.

I’m pretty sure my fourth-grade self would have wrinkled my nose at this cake — it’s got all the flavors I grew into the last few years. With lots of ginger, dark molasses, spicy cloves, and even stout beer(!), this gingerbread cake packs a lot of dark, spicy flavor. Thanks to the stout beer and molasses (the secret ingredients), it’s also incredibly moist, which is key for any ginger-baked good. The cake gets its sweetness from the cream cheese frosting, which is the cream cheese frosting of my dreams: creamy and sweet, but with a slight tangyness.

Keep in mind this recipe makes two petite cakes — one for sharing, and one for yourself.