Skip to main content
Dessert

Cocoa-nut Gingerbread

A gingerbread cookie made with wheat flour, rice flour, lemon rind, ginger, treacle, butter, sugar, and cocoa.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Cocoa-nut Gingerbread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix together the wheaten flour, rice flour, lemon rind, and ground ginger.

  2. In a saucepan, melt the treacle, butter, and sugar together until combined.

Make the batter

  1. Pour the nearly boiling mixture over the dry ingredients and beat with a wooden spoon until smooth.

  2. Let the batter cool completely.

  3. Once cool, stir in the grated cocoa.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Rice + gingertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,196 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Rice + cocoatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together93 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Wheaten flour
Provides the main structure of the batter once hydrated.
Treacle
Adds sweetness, moisture and deep color to the gingerbread.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and rich flavor.
Grated cocoa
Adds chocolate flavor and dark color to the batter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps keep the crumb moist.

The step that matters

Let the batter cool completely before adding the cocoa. Cocoa added to a very hot mixture can clump and its flavor and color can be uneven. Cooling first lets the cocoa disperse evenly through the batter.

Swap the cocoa

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, rice, lemon, ginger, butter, sugar):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Milletfits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Cocoathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, rice, lemon, ginger, butter, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Lemon Rice PuddingLemon Rice Pudding19 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesGinger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipes