In my ongoing battle to bargain with my brain to do small, unremarkable tasks, I’ve found that I have better success with my to-do lists if I scatter the jobs across the page — like sprigs of basil adorning a plate of pasta al pomodoro — rather than simply listing them one after the other. It’s stupid, but it generally works, which means it’s possibly not so stupid after all. Frequently, one of those untethered tasks is the phrase “vibe with food” which is my designated time to sit on the couch and try to invent or mentally develop and coax recipes into existence. Alas, because this task is non-urgent and fun it tends to get shunted (the system is sound but not bulletproof) but on my most recent attempt at vibing with food, two ingredients bobbed in my head: ginger and blackberries, and like Homer Simpson’s “dental plan/Lisa needs braces” reverie, through the repetition of both words I eventually thought: what if I put blackberries in gingerbread?

A reasonable question, as it turns out! Rather than reinvention for its own pompous sake I used an existing recipe by Nigella Lawson, my most trusted source on all things culinary, and pretty much all things, full stop. To that end this recipe is literally just her gingerbread + blackberries — so, if you’re suspicious of my fruity interference you can leave out the berries and still have an exemplary traditional baked good. However, walk with me here: this gingerbread is dark, dense, and sweet in a throat-burning kind of way, with the double fire of fresh and ground ginger and a fierce sprinkling of pepper to really bite back at you. The stair-step intensity of brown sugar, golden syrup, and creosote-thick molasses gives this a strapping, earthy sweetness, swirling with headily, bombastically aromatic cinnamon, allspice, and clove. Blackberries have their own musky spiciness, though mild in comparison to its teammates here, but this berry is made to be bathed in ginger, and its shirt-staining sourness brings a welcome treble note to all that bassy molasses.

I understand if the ingredient list and instructions both appear dauntingly endless, but the method is straightforward — if sticky — with everything stirred together languidly in one saucepan. Like David besting Goliath, somehow that one teaspoon of baking soda at the end brings this soupily liquid batter together to form a gingerbread of almost scientifically farcical dampness, like those days that are so humid it seems you could wring the air out with your bare hands, as though the clouds couldn’t possibly hold one more particle of moisture without exploding into rain. As such, this keeps for a long, long time (though I’d move the container to the fridge to prolong its lifetime after a week) and seems to taste more magnitudinously complex and damp with each passing day.

Because of its fa-la-la-la-la spices and generous shelf life, you could consider this as a low-key alternative to Christmas cake this December (in which case I might throw in a handful of sultanas or raisins). And for further adventures in baking with molasses, I suggest Bryant Terry’s Ginger-Molasses Cake, its cousin the Dark Chocolate Molasses Fruit Loaf, and my Christmas Star Cookies which you can obviously bake at any time of year.

Blackberry White Pepper Gingerbread

All I’ve done is put blackberries in Nigella Lawson’s vegan gingerbread recipe from Cook, Eat, Repeat — I love my addition and the blackberries truly sing with all that ginger but you can’t go wrong with her untampered original. This is dark, dense, and intense: perfect with an afternoon coffee, but you could serve it for dessert with a scoop of ice cream to cool off all that gingery, peppery heat. On that note, the pepper adds an extra layer of warmth to the ginger, but it’s not overwhelming — I liked the scansion of the two shades together so included it in the title.

• 125g (2/3 cup) brown sugar
• 150ml (2/3 cup) vegetable oil, eg rice bran
• 200g (2/3 cup) golden syrup
• 200g (2/3 cup) molasses
• 8 pitted prunes, roughly chopped
• 30g fresh ginger (about 2 inches), peeled
• 2 teaspoons cinnamon
• 2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon allspice
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/4 teaspoon ground white pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon table salt
• 250ml (1 cup) oat milk or soy milk
• 300g (just under 2 and 1/2 cups) flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 x 15ml tablespoons warm water
• 2 teaspoons malt vinegar or ACV
• 250g (roughly 1 and 1/2 cups) frozen blackberries
• 2 teaspoons flour, extra, for the blackberries

Note: This is best made the day before you need it. Also, it really is a melt-and-mix affair but with all the various textures and quantities it’s impossible to write the instructions out succinctly, so please bear with me!

1: Set your oven to 170C/325F. Nigella recommends a 9inch/23cm square tin, however, I used a 20x28cm dish without the slightest hint of the tide being out, so if you only have, say, a 25cm square dish then proceed with confidence. Either way: pull out a large piece of baking paper to line your baking dish, ensuring the sheet of paper is long enough for plenty of overhang (as you can see in the photos.)

2: Measure the 125g brown sugar and tip it into a large saucepan, followed by the 150ml vegetable oil and 200g each of golden syrup and molasses. Doing it in this order means the syrup will slide out of the oiled measuring jug, but also — aha! — doing the sugar first stops it from sticking to any of the syrup. I say this presuming you’re using the same vessel since all four ingredients are 2/3 cup volume. To the same pan add the eight chopped prunes (or you could snip the whole prunes above the pan with with kitchen scissors), and then either grate or finely dice the 30g fresh peeled ginger and add it to the pan as well. Finally, add the spices and salt: two teaspoons each of cinnamon and ground ginger, one teaspoon allspice, 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves, 1/4 teaspoon white pepper, and 1/2 teaspoon salt.

3: Gently whisk the contents of the pan over a low heat — you want to just warm it through and meld the ingredients together. This shouldn’t take more than a minute, and once you have a coherently dark pool, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the 250ml of milk.

4: Whisk in (again, gently) the 300g flour in batches, using the whisk to press out any noticeable lumps against the sides of the pan. The flour will want to clump together — it’s not you, it’s the science! — so go slowly and patiently.

5: Measure the teaspoon of baking soda into a clean 250ml measuring cup (or just use a coffee cup or mug or whatever’s nearest) and stir in the two tablespoons of warm water, followed by the two teaspoons of vinegar. It will fizz up, justifying the size of the cup it’s in, and once all three components are combined, whisk this into the gingerbread mixture, scraping out all the baking soda that might have settled at the bottom of the cup, and ensuring it’s thoroughly incorporated into the batter.

6: Finally, toss the 250g blackberries (I used frozen, straight from the freezer) in the two extra teaspoons of flour, and, switching to a spatula, fold them into the gingerbread batter. Tip this very liquid (and heavy!) mixture into your prepared baking dish, using the spatula to scrape out the pan. Bake for 50 – 55 minutes (although check after 45 if you have a quick oven). Unlike most cakes you can’t use the skewer test on this one, however, the top should appear firm, cakey, and be a little springy to the touch.

Let the gingerbread cool completely first, and (as per the note above) if you can, let it sit overnight before slicing and eating. It settles into itself and the texture and flavours improve — Nigella suggests a layer of baking paper followed by a layer of tinfoil, so that’s what I did — and from then on, store in an airtight container in a cool place.

The number of slices depends on the size of your tin, but I got 20 hearty squares out of this.

Notes:

• Nigella’s recipe uses ground black pepper, so feel free to use the former if you have it. She also used muscovado sugar instead of brown, but I had the latter so that’s what I used and it was still magnificent; I would love to make this again with muscovado though, and if you have it then by all means use it.
• If you’re fortunate enough to have fresh blackberries then use them instead — frozen berries tend to be a little heavier but the same volume will work fine.
  If you’re on the fence about the prunes, they somehow melt into the cooked gingerbread and are not individually detectable.

music lately:

Silent Air by The Sound, it commences with downbeat gloom and then those shyly optimistic keyboards come in and it’s like when you’re driving through the wide-open countryside in the rain but you can see far enough into the distance to where blue sky parts the clouds over some horizon-bound village (and if you prefer to be in the rain then reverse the metaphor, I guess.)

Again by Janet Jackson. Few people have such a commanding grasp on affecting chord progressions as she — see also the verses in Funny How Time Flies (When You’re Having Fun) — and that tearful crack in her voice in the final third makes me extremely emotional!

Theme from Sparta F.C. by The Fall. There’s a few versions of this and they’re all pleasingly tenacious yet nonsensical, but the earlier Peel Sessions one goes hardest.

We’ll Take a Glass Together by Michael Jeter and Brent Barrett at the 1990 Tony Awards performance of Grand Hotel; under the category of Tony performances that are ostensibly light-hearted but make me sob (there’s something about an audience’s appreciative mid-number applause for a dance formation that always gets me). Barrett is no slouch, dance-wise, but Michael Jeter is otherworldly — where are his limbs COMING from? How does his head remain so level? What physics-flouting witchcraft is this?

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