This is a rich, candy-like dessert. A small piece goes a long, delicious way. For a more intricate icing, drizzle melted red currant jelly in straight lines over the icing. Pull the point of a knife through the lines to make a pretty design.
Use about 8oz of shortbread cookies and process in a food processor to make crumbs. Make the slices up to three days ahead of time.
By MELISSA CLARK (Photo Evan Sung for The New York Times) There is gingerbread, a homey and rustic snack with tea. And then there is ginger cake, which is fancier and company-worthy and meant for dessert.
This rich, fragrant confection from The Marrow in the West Village is decidedly on the cake side of this gingery spectrum.
Miette’s gingerbread cake started as a seasonal cake, arriving with the crisp days of fall. But when we tried to cycle it out, there was so much demand that we made it available year-round. It remains our best-selling cake, very moist, deeply spicy, and topped with a silky cream cheese frosting. We bake it as a small cake, but you can also prepare it in small loaf pans.
Tangy and sweet, classic cream cheese frosting has topped both carrot cake and gingerbread forever, and far be it from us to separate these classic American pairings. Although it was difficult to improve on the original recipe, we have added a few steps to the method to keep the consistency smooth and shiny; softening the butter and creaming it with the sugar until smooth before adding the cream cheese will eliminate any little bits of butter that have a tendency to pop up in cream cheese frosting.
