This is an old family recipe. I haven’t had this anywhere else so I’m not sure if my grandma invented this. It’s extremely easy to make. It’s traditional Dutch boterkoek with a twist. It looks like “butter cake” is a common translation for boterkoek but it’s not completely right. In Dutch, cookie = koekje and koek is basically a large cookie, the size of a cake. You make a dough, not a batter, and it won’t rise.
Ingredients:
350 gr flour
250 gr butter, room temperature
200 gr sugar
Little bit of vanilla essence
125 gr shredded stem ginger in syrup (for Dutchies: half a jar of AH Bakgember)
A few more pieces of stem ginger to decorate
Put all ingredients except the pieces of stem ginger in a bowl. Knead into a ball. Transfer the ball to a buttered pie/quiche/brownie pan or spring form, I use an 11" quiche pan. Flatten with your hands into a round shape. Bake 20 minutes at 180C.
Leave to cool before taking it out of the pan, like a cookie it’s soft at first. It’s very rich so you’re supposed to eat small slices. The cake can be stored in an airtight container for quite a long time (I’ve never seen one that had gone bad).
Stem ginger is one of my favourite baking ingredients! You can buy it in large pieces or pre-shredded in here. My grandma used to drink any leftover syrup in her tea.
Sorry if that was unclear! The shredded ginger goes in with all the ingredients when you knead the dough. The larger pieces of ginger for decoration are added after you’ve transferred the dough to the pan, right before baking.
The pre-shredded ginger I buy, isn’t really seperate ginger and syrup, it has a consistency a bit like jelly (unlike stem ginger which is sold as pieces of ginger floating in liquid). I spoon that straight from the jar into the dough. But if there’s a lot of liquid in your shredded ginger, then it’s probably better to drain it. You can always add a little bit of syrup to the dough afterwards, to add some extra flavour, but you don’t want the dough to get all wet.
I always kept the leftover syrup from the jars of stem ginger and gave them to my grandma. She would drink it in her tea and she was convinced that was really healthy. I’m not quite sure about that, there’s probably more sugar than ginger in it, but on the other hand, she lived to the age of 86, in good health, so who am I to disagree?
