I’ve made gingerbread houses, decorated gingerbread cookies, made gingerbread waffles… are you sensing a theme here?  Everything but actual gingerbread.  It was probably last Christmas when it occurred to me that gingerbread, as in a bread type item, was a thing.  A thing that I should, in fact, make.  Fast forward a year – I needed to come up with both a treat for a third grade party and something for FBF.  I went with gingerbread.  It is amazing.  And festive.  It makes your house smell like a special wintery holiday.

Of course I couldn’t follow the recipe because I do not have a 9×9 pan.  I have 2 8×8 and one 9×13.  I started to do the math and then I decided to go with two 8×8 since I needed half the gingerbread to be portable.  I doubled this recipe  and I cooked it about 5-8 extra minutes to accommodate the smaller pan/taller bread.

I will admit that I added a little extra sugar because I got cocky with my digital scale.  One of the things I love about the King Arthur Flour website is that you can toggle between volume and weight for ingredients.  I always use my scale for flour because I hate measuring flour – the scale is life changing.  But then once I had the flour in the bowl, I zeroed the weight and started dumping in sugar and I went way over.  It was kind of hard to remove the extra sugar because it was a thin layer on top of the flour. So.  This may be a little sweeter that the actual recipe.  (As in 14o grams of sugar instead of 100 – or 70 instead of 50 if you aren’t doubling.)

I would say it got mixed results from a class of 3rd graders who may have been expecting a brownie. On Friday, I thought it had a strong molasses aftertaste which I didn’t mind, but didn’t LOVE. A day and a half later, it’s perfect.  Or maybe it has grown on me.

The boys had a side of gingerbread for Fancy Breakfast Friday with whatever else they wanted for breakfast that day. (Within reason.)  Luke had a fried egg on toast and Jack had oatmeal with blueberries, almonds and maple syrup.