Tis the season to be Jolly and this Orange Glazed Fresh Cranberry Gingerbread is a wonderful way to welcome the festive season with open arms. Spicy and sweet and packed full of ginger and molasses. And bright flavourful pops of tart cranberries and a sweet simple orange glaze to top it all off. Seriously if that doesn’t scream festive season to you then I don’t know what will.
Gingerbread
This is a pretty basic gingerbread recipe, it’s one I tweaked from an old post (Old Fashioned Orcadian Gingerbread) changing a few things and adding fresh cranberries and a sweet simple orange glaze. To give it a more festive feel.
It has a deep sweet spicy molasses flavour to it and the sour fresh cranberries add a real pop of flavour to each bite. The sweet simple orange glaze brings it all together. You need to be a fan of molasses to really enjoy the rich deep flavours this orange glazed fresh cranberry gingerbread has. Don’t worry if you live in the UK and you find molasses difficult to come by, you can totally use black treacle in its place.
Simple melt and mix
Like a lot of my gingerbread recipes, I like to melt the molasses/treacle, butter and sometimes the sugar together first. I find this helps to give the gingerbread a more dense, sticky consistency over the lighter cake-like consistency you get by using the creaming method. Its simple to do and only takes a few minutes. I got this trick off of my Mum, she makes a wonderful non-molasses gingerbread (which I will be sharing soon) using this method and it helps to give it that lovely sticky feeling.
I must apologise for the weird photos, but it gets dark pretty early here in Scotland in the Winter and I foolishly made this in the afternoon. Yep, my fella can smell gingerbread at 100 paces and this was not going to last unscathed until the following day. Hence why I only really have half a loaf of this Orange Glazed Fresh Cranberry Gingerbread to show you. I do have one picture with the whole loaf but it was taken on my phone so please accept my apologies!
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Orange Glazed Fresh Cranberry Gingerbread
Ingredients
- 280 grams plain / all purpose flour (2 and ¼ cups)
- 110 light brown sugar (1/2 cup lightly packed)
- 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon ground allspice
- 2 tablespoons ground ginger
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 75 grams unsalted butter (1/3 cup)
- 110 grams dark molasses / black treacle (1/4 cup + 1 tablespoon)
- 2 large eggs lightly beaten
- 240 millilitres milk (1 cup)
- 125 grams of fresh or frozen cranberries (1 cup)
Glaze
- 10 tablespoons icing sugar (Powdered sugar)
- Juice 1/2 an Orange
Instructions
- Preheat your oven to 180C / 350F / Gas mark 4 and lightly grease a 2-pound loaf tin or use a liner like I did.
- In a medium-sized mixing bowl add the flour, sugar, spices, baking soda and salt and give it a gentle mix so everything is well combined.
- In a small saucepan over a low heat add in the butter and molasses / black treacle and very gently heat until the butter is melted into the molasses.
- Give it a few minutes to cool down a little bit and whisk in the lightly beaten eggs and half of the milk.
- Pour this mixture into the dry ingredients. Then carefully mix it all together to form a light in colour pourable batter. You may need to add more of the milk at this time to loosen the batter. You want it pourable but not overly runny, I found I did not use all of the milk.
- Fold in your cranberries.
- Pour the batter into your prepared tin and pop it into your hot oven.
- I have a notoriously slow oven so it took 50 minutes to bake through but check it at the 35-minute mark to see if it's done. Insert a pick and it should come out clean.
- Once baked through take it out of the oven but leave it in its tin to cool for 10 minutes then transfer it to a wire rack to fully cool down.
- For the glaze, mix the icing sugar with the juice from half an orange and drizzle over the top of your cool loaf.
- Slice and enjoy.
- I have found this loaf freezes well for at least 2 months unglazed.
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This has my name written all over it! I love gingerbread SO much! Especially with cranberries!
Thank you, Kelsie 🙂
I am drooling here!! The glaze and the berries look so appealing! 😀
Thank you Lorraine 😀
THIS looks like the sexiest Christmas Morning bread I have ever seen. It seriously looks so dang cozy and straight out of a quintessential Holiday Movie! Just looking at this bread is giving me the warm and fuzzies!
Thanks GiGi 😀
yes, photographing dinners and such in winter just doesn’t work out, and it’s a big frustration for me!!
i LOVE this bread–cranberries and oranges go so well together, and incorporating them into gingerbread is genius. 🙂
Thanks, Grace, Winter is the bane of food bloggers lives…lol
Gingerbread with cranberries sounds great. I love how it looks, can’t wait to try a glutenfree version.
It would be easy to swap out the flour for a plain GF flour mix Balvinder 🙂
mmmm!!! the only gingerbread things i usually make are cookies, and never cake, but that needs to change. love the addition of cranberries and orange in here too!
Thank you, Heather 🙂
This is such a festive and pretty loaf Emma. What do you think of me using dried cranberries though because we do not have fresh cranberries in season now. But I do have a bag of dried cranberries and I would really like to try this recipe. It really makes an impressive dessert
Hi Ashika, dried would work but I don’t they would be as tart as the fresh would be. You can use frozen cranberries if they are available to you. But in a pinch I am sure dried would still be tasty 😀
Such a beautiful gingerbread loaf…absolutely perfect for the breakfast!
Thank you, Angie 😀
Sounds delicious! Cranberries are such a treat in baked goods. Not knowing much about treacle, I was wondering if molasses can be routinely substituted for it? I’ve got a number of baking books that I purchased in the UK and wasn’t sure what to do when treacle was suggested.
Thank you, Shauna. Black treacle is 95% the same as molasses, its flavour is a tiny bit stronger so I usually put about a tablespoon less of black treacle in if I am substituting it for molasses.
Black treacle falls somewhere in between molasses and blackstrap molasses. But be careful a lot of us Brits will call Golden Syrup, treacle, and that is another ball game altogether! Its golden in colour, very sweet and has the consistency of corn syrup.
You could sub corn syrup for golden syrup but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as sweet. Which may be a good thing!!! If the recipe is a pale looking one, like granola bars, flapjacks, pale gingerbread they may mean golden syrup. If it’s a dark looking recipe that isn’t overly sweet they probably mean black treacle. Hope that helps a little bit here is a link about golden syrup that might help
https://www.lylesgoldensyrup.com/our-range/our-classic-tin/product-golden-syrup
and here is one about black treacle https://www.lylesgoldensyrup.com/our-range/our-classic-tin/product-black-treacle