Gingerbread White Chocolate Snack Cake Recipe
Looking for a festive but non-traditional holiday dessert? This gluten-free cake might just fit the bill. It has the fudgy, luxurious texture of flourless chocolate cake, but it's flavored with seasonal gingerbread spices and white chocolate. This cake is leavened with whipped egg whites, which means that it moves less during baking and allows you to create a beautiful swirled design on top. Swapping the traditional chocolate for white chocolate gives the cake a more neutral flavor that forms the perfect base for the addition of molasses and spices.
Making the Gingerbread White Chocolate Snack Cake
Unlike standard cakes that rely on you to cream together butter and sugar, the trick with this cake is nailing the meringue. Too soft and the cake won't bake up to be as airy as it could. Too dry and overbeaten and the cake could deflate in the oven. Recipe developer Taylor Murray reveals one secret to avoiding those classic meringue pitfalls: 'Separate the egg yolks from the whites very gently and transfer them to another vessel as you go. That way, if you break a yolk, you can use that for something else and won't contaminate your whole bowl of clean whites.' Once you've mastered your meringue, you'll have a flavorful and elegant cake to snack on through the holidays.
Ingredients and Preparation
The base batter for this cake is made by whipping egg whites and folding them into a mixture of sugar, almond flour, and melted white chocolate. Instead of beating sugar with butter, we use vegetable oil to provide fat, which is warmed with a little milk. After dividing the meringue, it is folded into the base cake, which is mixed with molasses and warm baking spices like ground cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and ginger. The rest of the meringue is mixed with white chocolate powder, which is a powdered version of white chocolate that is used to make white chocolate mochas and other treats.
Tips for Perfect Meringue
Making perfect meringue isn't as tough as it might seem, and a few simple tips can help you avoid some common mistakes in the process. First of all, make sure your egg whites are at room temperature before you start. This helps them whip up bigger and better. It's also very important to use clean tools — any grease in your bowl or on your beaters will cause the whole process to fail.
When you're adding sugar, do it gradually in a thin stream once the whites are foamy. If you throw it in too early or all at once, your meringue won't get as fluffy as it could. Finer sugar works best because it mixes in more easily, but regular granulated sugar is acceptable too. The real trick is in the beating — you want stiff, shiny peaks. If you overdo it, the meringue gets dry, but not enough beating means it won't hold up. Adding a bit of something acidic, like cream of tartar, lemon juice, or vinegar, can help to stabilize the whites and help them to hold more air, but it's not a strictly necessary ingredient.
