Helena's Ginger Birthday Cake

This month my lovely housemate Helena turned a ripe old 25.. sorry ripe young 25 and so cake was in order.

I used this chance to try out a cake recipe from my low fat cook book - The Red Velvet Chocolate Heartache book. The recipes in this book are all low in fat and based on different types of fruits and vegetables which act as replacements for things like butter and oil. The replacement is done without loosing any of the flavour or texture of the cake. I stumbled across this recipe which doesn't have a picture in the book to drool over, but the use of three different gingers products caught my attention. When I asked Helena if she liked ginger's she promptly replied YES, though she may have thought I was taking about Ginger boys instead, but cake is what she got!

The vegetable base of this recipe was a butternut squash - finely grated. OH MY GOD butternut squash is not easy to finely grate and so I gave up about halfway through and gabbed the normal grater to finished off the horrendous job. I think I need to invest in a grating attachment for the Kitchen Aid and let Big Red do the job and leave working on my upper arm strength at yoga instead. After that job was done the rest was easy! I did manage to run out of ginger stem syrup and only used about half the requirement for the icing, but there was a definite ginger kick throughout the cake with the combination of stem, ground and raw ginger in the mix... a ginger lovers dream!

I already have a butternut squash lined up to bake this again very soon.

Happy Birthday Helena and Happy Baking all x