Ginger B.A.M.
One bad arse muffin! + a few favorite books
When holidays roll around, I – like many of you assumably – want to bake. I love filling my home with the intoxicating smell of any combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, allspice and ginger. It triggers such lovely memories as it pulls me to Christmas (winter). It brings me complete joy. There are so many ways to include this blend of spices in my bakes.
One in particular for me is gingerbread.
THAT super gingery boozy Ginger Cake
I think my love affair started as a kid growing up in Bermuda. There was a dense, dark, almost black, super gingery “adult” ( boozy) cake that would traditionally appear on the Christmas and Boxing Day tables of Aunt Margie and Grandma Tatem (who lived to be 101, probably because of this very cake).
Most of the kids wouldn’t go near it, but it beckoned me. That became my holiday “marker,” and I longingly looked forward to our holiday visits with them because there was always good food, all of it made from scratch, and always including the traditional Bermudian Christmas cake (aka fruit cake), and THAT cake.
THAT cake was my thing.
I salivate thinking about it even now, more than 50 years later. Grandma Tatem and Aunt Margie have long since passed and apparently the recipe chose to go with them. As an adult I began a quest to find something that would match that memory. Still searching!
Consequently, I have made a lot of gingerbread recipes and this one is pretty darned good. It leaves a tingle of “spice” on your tongue.
At my Mary’s Marvelous shop, I turned this into muffins making their showy debut in the winter months. My husband loved it so much, he coined it as the “B.A.M. - The Bad Ass Muffin.”