A bit more baking: Queen's gingerbread

You know those days when you wake up and you suddenly know exactly what you want to cook and nothing else will do the trick? That.

The other day I was seized with an unshakeable certainty that I really, really wanted to cook this recipe for Queen's Gingerbread that I'd torn out of the Guardian a while back.

I wanted something dark and dense and dammit, something that would use up the half inch of stem ginger in syrup that had been knocking around at the back of my cupboard for ages.

This is what happened:

It tasted great, and was stodgy as all get-out. Just what I needed. I took to carry around squares of it in a tiny tupperware box in case of cake-based emergencies - those unfortunate times when you have a cup of tea, a sweet tooth and nothing to sate it with.

The recipe was dangerously easy to make and the only substitution I had to make was swapping out honey for agave - no egg-replacer rouletter for me, no sir. Sure, I let the almonds slide due to the fact that my partner has a weirdly pathologic hatred of them of a magnitude typically reserved for seal-clubbers. He's wrong of course (about the almonds, not the seal clubbers) but still, the Queen's gingerbread went nude - just don't tell the Queen....