Celebrating 40 Days of Yoga with Dark Chewy Gingerbread

40 days ago, today, I challenged my fellow mommy friend,  Brittany, to join me in taking up a challenge to do yoga every day for 40 days. It takes 40 days to make our break a habit, and the idea was that after 40 days we would both be craving yoga and would continue to do it daily. I can say that it was a success! Not only do I need yoga every day now, I have also felt my body strengthen after childbirth to the point where I need 40 minutes to an hour of yoga. I started off challenging myself to just 20 minutes a day. It was all I felt I had time for with Jaxson, and to be honest, I was still so weak and out of shape from my pregnancy and delivery (even though it had been 6 months) that it's all my body could handle. It was amazing to me how fast that changed though! After only 20 days, not only did I need to increase how much I did each day, but if I missed a day (as I admit, did happen as it was over Christmas... To make up for it, I did double the next day) I had trouble going to sleep and felt there was too much energy contained in my body. I'm happy to say I succeeded in this challenge and will continue doing yoga every day from here on out! It has become a vital part of my life and a stabilizer for me as a new mum - it is what I need each day to balance and center myself to be the best mum I can be.

To celebrate this success, I decided to try a new recipe from an amazing baking book Adrian found a few months ago: In The Sweet Kitchen.

This book is like a course in baking, written by a very successful baker from Toronto. In the first half, she talks about ingredients and utensils for baking, what to spend money on, what you can skimp on, what different ingredients' job is in recipes, even where in the oven you should place the baking tray.... It's amazing! The second half has some of the most incredible recipes I have ever seen! Decadent, but made accessible to the humble, cheap home baker!

I eventually want to try every recipe in this book. To celebrate today, I decided to try her Black Sticky Gingerbread!

I didn't have any dark or flower honey, but I did have some manuka honey. Since it's so expensive, though, I only used a tablespoon and topped that up with boring old liquid honey. I like to think it gave this cake a richer flavour. I'm also not a huge fan of fresh ginger in baking- I find it too spicey and that it often overpowers the dish... So to try minimize that and avoid any chunks in bites, I used a rasp to grate the ginger. I'm glad I did! This cake does have a bit of a bite to it, and unless you're a big fan of fresh ginger, I would grate it as finely as you can!

Melting the liquid ingredients and brown sugar. Beautiful butter swirl!

I first melted the first five ingredients, mixing well and then set it aside in a large bowl to cool. Once it cooled, I beat in the eggs, one at a time, then stirred in the milk. Next, I added the dry ingredients and placed the dough in a 9x9 pan to bake. You don't want to mix it too much, as I think I did (see the bubbles in the batter in the picture below).

Ready to bake.

Bake at 325 for 1-1.5 hours, until the cake bounces back when you touch it. I only needed to bake it for just over an hour.

50 minutes in and my tummy was grumbling and my mouth was watering! It smelled sooooooo good!

Done and cooling!

No idea why the diamond appeared during baking, but I kind of like it.

Let the cake cool in the pan for 15 minutes and then transfer to a wire rack. The parchment paper lining the greased pan is a trick from this book to easily and neatly remove the cake - it works like a charm!

This cake is rich, dark, flavourful and chewy. Interestingly, I find that more of the flavour comes out of it over time - it doesn't all hit you at once. A very nice effect!

It's recommended to serve it at room temperature, but quite frankly, it's good cold out of the fridge or warmed up in the oven or microwave too! I served it with a rum, cinnamon and vanilla whipped cream. Yum!