I’m a newcomer to parkin. I’ve made gingerbread and other assorted gingery cakes before, but never parkin. I wanted to make a ginger cake today and didn’t have any golden syrup but did have black treacle, so I settled on parkin when I came across a recipe whilst flicking through my beloved Be-Ro cook book (which I inherited from my mum and must be at least 30-odd years old).
I’ve tinkered with the recipe a little to make it more interesting. It turned out really good! I doubled the ground ginger content as well as adding a spoonful of chopped stem ginger plus some syrup from the stem ginger jar too. This makes it nice and spicy and adds a welcome oomph. I also love the oats in parkin – which is part of the traditional recipe – they make it more robust than a normal gingerbread.
Aside from the melting of the treacle, butter and milk, it’s very kid friendly, so it’s a great rainy day activity with the kids. I seem to be doing a lot of these type of activities recently…
Makes: 16 decent pieces
Prep time: 5 minutes
Cook time: 35 minutes
Tital time: 40 minutes
Ingredients:
100 g self-raising flour
100 g porridge oats
100 g soft brown sugar
2 teaspoons of ground ginger
100 g black treacle
50 g butter
5 tablespoons of milk
1 egg
1 tablespoon of stem ginger syrup
1 tablespoon of chopped stem ginger
Instructions:
- Preheat oven to 160C. Grease a
- Melt your treacle, butter and milk in a saucepan over a low heat.
- Put your flour, oats, sugar, and ground ginger into a bowl. Once your treacle mixture has melted together, add this to the dry ingredients and stir.
- Add your beaten egg, your chopped ginger and your ginger syrup. Give it all a good stir and pour your cake mixture into a greased and lined tin (I used a 20cm x 20cm tin).
- Bake for about 35 minutes. Take out and allow to cool before tipping out of tin, peeling off the parchment, and sitting on a cooling rack. Cut into 16 pieces or wrap in foil and allow to mature. This would keep in a tin, and get better in fact, if left for a few days. I couldn’t wait that long, and ate a couple of pieces when it was still warm!
Now that IS weird!! It must be a bloggers consciousness. Yours looks darker and with the oats, more traditional. I'm loving mine too. Great stuff!!
Great looking parkin – I love that treacle taste. I really like the idea of that stem ginger addition too.
Rachel, after I posted my parkin today I decided to see who else had made parkin and found your post from several years ago. Your parkin, though a bit different from mine, looks lovely! So many people go overboard with the brown sugar/golden treacle/black treacle with the total weight of them far exceeding the total weight of the flour and oats.