Recipe: Peach + Pecan Gingerbread

Our home-chef Gabby serves up a massive dose of capital "C" Comfort with this delicious seasonal Peach + Pecan Gingerbread. Gabby has based the recipe on the Treacle Spiced Tray Bake of legendary British Cooking expert, Mary Berry - a special recipe her mother baked at Christmas, which makes the original recipe over 100 years old. Champion of home cooks, and one of Gabby's foodie heroes – 89 and still going strong!

This dish is one of four that features as part of our SUMMER 2024 RECIPES. Be sure to check out the complementary dishes that make up the rest of the feast:

• Stuffed Capsicums / Eggplants + Pesto-Roasted Mushrooms
• Baked Ricotta with Roasted Cherry Tomatoes + Zucchini
• Grainy Summer Salad

"We made this luscious gingerbread, gooey with cooked peach and the crunch of pecans, in a long loaf tin, as pictured. It was delicious, served warm as a ‘pudding’. It is a very large mixture, and it rose a lot…oozing, volcano-like out of the tin and onto the oven racks. To avoid this, we suggest you use a larger tin – see below – or make two smaller loaves. We served ours warm as dessert, with lots of extra sliced fresh peaches and nectarines and a generous drizzle of the beautifully creamy Blue Ray organic Sour Cream. If you’re taking this somewhere else to share, pack the cooled cake in an airtight container, bring the fruit unsliced, and the sour cream in its own container. Assemble on site: slice the fruit, drizzle over sour cream…and enjoy! The cake will keep for up to a week and actually becomes more mellow moistness -  but you’ll need a good hiding spot." 

- Gabby xxx

PEACH + PECAN GINGERBREAD

Serves: 8 - 10 people

Preparation + Cooking time: about 1 hour

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Ingredients (gingerbread):

• 225g organic butter, softened
• 150 organic raw sugar (or brown sugar)
• 225g Organic Times Blackstrap Molasses (or black treacle)
• 300g self-raising flour (or Gluten-free flour)
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger 
• 4 organic eggs
• 4 tablespoons milk
• 3 teaspoons fresh minced ginger (or from jar – we used  Spiral Foods Organic Minced ginger, 210 g jar.)
• Peaches, 2 sliced and ¼ cup pecan halves, to decorate the top (before you bake)

Ingredients (to serve): 

• Blue Ray Sour Cream, 1 cup/ ½ tub (leftover from baked ricotta recipe)
• Fresh stone fruit, sliced - we used sliced yellow peaches, white peaches and Cut a rectangle of non stick baking paper to fit the base and sides of a 30x23x4cm  traybake tin or roasting tin. Grease the tin and then line with the paper, pushing it neatly into the corners of the tin.

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 160C fan, or 180 C conventional oven.
2. Measure all the ingredients for the traybake into a large mixing bowl or electric mixer and beat well for about 3 to 5 minutes until well blended. We used an electric mixer but of course you can also mix it by hand with a wooden spoon. (Treacle can be difficult to weigh accurately as it tends to stick to the scale pan. Weigh the treacle on top of the sugar to avoid this.)
   
   
   
   
    
3. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin, scraping the sides of the bowl with a plastic spatula to remove all the mixture. Level the top gently with the back of the spatula.
   
   
   
   
4. Decorate the top with the sliced peaches and pecans in whatever design pleases you.
5. Bake in the preheated oven for about 35-40 minutes, or until the traybake springs back when pressed lightly with a finger in the centre and is beginning to shrink away from the sides of the tin.
6. Allow the traybake to cool a little, then remove the cake from the tin by easing the paper away from the sides of the tin. Turn onto a cooling rack, remove the lining paper and leave to cool completely.
7. When ready to serve, slice fresh stonefruit and decorate the top of the cake with fruit and drizzled sour cream. 
   
   
   
   
   
     
   
   
   

You may also want to revisit some of our summer recipes from the archives:

Summer 2023 recipes - Aunty Ida’s Pavlova, Torta Caprese, Caponata, Smoked Trout Dip

Summer 2022 - Last Minute Xmas Cake