Ginger chocolate chip pound cake

My celebration of Chocolate Week continutes with another great chocolate flavour combination... ginger and chocolate are such a winning combination and I don't use them together nearly often enough. I can't quite think to myself why I haven't got round to making this recipe before now, given my love of this combination. It was originally published in April and can be found on the Guardian website here.

A cake with a very attractive crack as it baked! I had to make one minor modification (extra plain flour instead of ground almonds) and give my ingredients below:

Ginger chocolate chip pound cake
Ingredients
100g unsalted butter, melted
200g caster sugar
125g full-fat cream cheese
3 medium eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp ground ginger
75g chopped glacé ginger
125g dark chocolate, chopped into small chunks
250g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder

Method

- Preheat the oven to gas 4/180C. Grease and line the sides of a 2lb loaf tin with baking parchment.

- Cream the butter and caster sugar until smooth. While the butter is still warm, beat in the cream cheese thoroughly and then add the eggs one at a time, continuing to beat until the mixture is light.

- Add the vanilla, ginger (ground and glace) and chocolate pieces, beating well to combine.

- Sift the flour and baking powder into the mixture and stir through the mixture until no flour remains.

- Pour/spoon into the prepared tin and bake for 60-70 minutes until a cake tester inserted comes out clean, remembering that hitting a piece of chocolate will never give you a clean tester!

- Allow to cool on a wire rack.

I left mine in for longer than specified until it seemed done. Sorry about the unhelpful vagueness of this comment - I must have lost track of how long the cake spent in the oven altogether.

I wanted to like this more than I actually did. Don't misunderstand me, I really did like the cake, but perhaps I had set my expectations unrealistically high, or was expecting a different kind of cake. I think that this was an excellent example of a pound cake - the crumb was soft and moist and the crust a little dry and crumbly, just as I was expecting. I think perhaps my current ground ginger is a bit under-powered because I didn't really get much ginger flavour from the cake mixture itself, although biting into bits of crystallised stem ginger was lovely and, well, biting into bits of chocolate is always lovely!

Some parts of it were absolutely stuffed full of chocolate and ginger, but in the interests of fairness, a good proportion of the loaf had more of the add-ins towards the bottom than the top. Although they didn't all sink, which is an excellent thing! A good cake, and one to make again if the occasion to use some cream cheese up arises.

Keep visiting for more Chocolate Week goodies....