What if one ingredient could transform your entire baking?
In GINGER: Building the Gingerbread Bakery, Andrew Walker takes a single, distinctive ingredient and reveals its full potential - guiding you from fresh ginger root to a complete repertoire of flavours, techniques and recipes.
The journey begins with the fundamentals. Learn how to transform raw ginger into essential kitchen staples including stem ginger, ginger syrup, paste, juice and powdered ginger. Each method is clearly explained and designed for the home cook, allowing you to build a versatile ginger toolkit from scratch.
From there, the book introduces six foundational spice blends - among them gingerbread, speculaas and lebkuchen - each with its own character, balance and traditional roots. These blends form the backbone of a wide-ranging collection of recipes that bring the toolkit to life.
Recipes include cakes, biscuits, breads, pastries, drinks, custards and preserves, all designed to be approachable while delivering depth of flavour. Whether you are baking a simple cake or developing more ambitious creations, the book provides both structure and inspiration.
At its heart, GINGER is about more than recipes. It is about understanding how flavour works - how sweetness, heat and spice interact - and how to use that knowledge in your own kitchen.
For home bakers, cooks and anyone with a love of warm spices and traditional techniques, GINGER offers a fresh and practical way to explore one of the most versatile ingredients in baking.
Table of Contents:
Contents include:
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Introduction
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A Bakery and the Fresh, Local, Seasonal mantra
DIY Ginger
- Fresh Ginger Root
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Stem Ginger
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Ginger Syrup
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Ginger Paste
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Ginger Juice
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Powdered Ginger
Ginger Spice Blends
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Mixed Spice
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Lebkuchen Spice
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Speculaas Spice
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Quatre Epices (Sweet & Savoury)
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Pumpkin Spice
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Gingerbread Spice
Baking and Recipes
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Cakes
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Biscuits
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Bread & Pastry
- Drinks & Cocktails
- Preserves & Custards
The Ginger Challenge
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Creating your own recipes
- Understanding flavour balance, sweetness, heat and texture
About the Author :
Andrew Walker is a home cook who lives with his wife and daughter in Shropshire. Having collected cookbooks for 30 years, attended dozens of cookery courses and setup an online shop sending cakes all over the UK during the Pandemic, he had a vision to write a book and use the proceeds to help setup a traditional bakery in his home Town of Market Drayton: The Home of Gingerbread.
