“Hansel & Gretel”

GINGERBREAD CAKE with BLOOD ORANGE SYRUP

In the annals of books that upset and terrified me, Grimms’ Fairy Tales is surprisingly absent. It would make a heck of a lot more sense if this collection of creepy and horribly violent stories had kept me up at night as a kid, but for some reason I simply couldn’t get enough of them. In third grade I discovered a dusty old copy of the book in my attic while snooping around after school with my best friends, Christie and Meg. We were heavily into mysteries and ghost stories at the time, and when we found the book we were certain that we had discovered some dark secret that my parents had tried to keep under lock and key.

The book was wonderfully old, with gilded pages and illustrations covered by thin sheets of onion paper, full of beautiful words like “dearth” and “soothsayer” and “earthenware.” From then on, every chance we got, we snuck up to the attic, settled on some old packing blankets, and read it by flashlight.

In reality, my parents had gotten the book as a gift from a distant relative after my older sister was born and had stashed it in the attic, thinking (with very good reason) that it wasn’t well suited for bedtime reading. The only real memory I have of this relative is being forced to sit on her lap at a family gathering when I was very little and her telling me, “If you don’t brush your hair, your thumbs will fall off!” so it’s not surprising that she was the one who gave my parents the book. Grimms’ Fairy Tales are full of children meeting violent ends—losing limbs or getting lost in forests or being eaten by witches or wolves—but they are also full of food.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm knew well what it was like to want for food. Although they lived comfortably for the first few years of their lives, by the time they reached their teens they had been orphaned and left to care for their younger siblings. While compiling their collection of fairy tales they often ate only one tiny meal a day in order to make sure that their brothers and sisters were properly fed, so it makes sense that food would figure so powerfully in almost all of their stories. It is either overly abundant or absent completely; it heals and destroys, taunts, teases, nourishes, and saves; but it is always part of the narrative.

After reading a few tales, Christie, Meg, and I always found ourselves terribly hungry and, often, while eating graham crackers and peanut butter and drinking ice-cold milk, we felt vaguely guilty thinking of the starving characters we had just read about. It was conveniently close to Christmas when we reached the story of Hansel and Gretel. We had smuggled up to the attic a few Christmas decorations that we thought our parents wouldn’t miss and switched from reading by flashlight to reading by electric Advent candle.

All three of us had read an edited, child-friendly version of the story at some point in our lives, which made the discovery of the original version all the more shocking. We were disgusted by Hansel and Gretel’s father, so willing to kill his own children at his horrible new wife’s bidding, and incensed that he got off scot-free in the end. The scene that shocked me the most, though, was the one in which Hansel and Gretel discover the witch’s house and immediately begin to devour it with abandon, not even pausing when the old woman appears and yells that someone is eating her house! I was raised to respect adults, and I was horrified at Hansel and Gretel for being so piggish and rude to the old lady, witch or not.

We decided that the only way to rectify this horrid misdeed was to build our own versions of the witch’s house, so Christie, Meg, and I began drawing enormous, intricate blueprints for the ultimate gingerbread house. Meg’s included spiral staircases and balconies with frosting icicles hanging from them, Christie’s had colorful stained-glass sugar windows, and mine featured pink spun-sugar clouds suspended above the house and a pistachio-pudding swamp. When we actually went to build our houses, we discovered that we were going to have to pare things down considerably.

In the end, we decided to pool our efforts into making one grand house rather than three. We drew and cut and traced, both on paper and on dough, editing and reworking our original ideas, chatting about the fairy tale as we mixed and rolled and waited for things to cool. It was not unlike many professional kitchen experiences I would have years later, bouncing ideas off fellow cooks, drawing and measuring, dreaming huge and then simplifying, simplifying, simplifying. Hours later, eyes bleary and fingers cramped, we stood back to look proudly upon our crooked masterpiece. Even though our stomachs were grumbling and our noses were full of the aromas of molasses and cloves, we didn’t eat an inch of it, not one broken corner.

I have always found it frustrating that gingerbread houses—which are glorious in their complete edibleness—are not meant, really, for eating. You toil and sweat, smelling good smells and touching sticky dough and mixing sweet icing for hours and your only reward is visual. It seems so wrong. This gingerbread cake is superior not only because it is actually meant for devouring but also because it is serious and grown-up and dark, which is how I think the Brothers Grimm would have wanted it to be. The blood orange syrup pairs perfectly with the cake’s heavy spicing, and it looks creepy to boot.

“HANSEL AND GRETEL”

Gingerbread Cake with Blood Orange Syrup

This cake is delicious right out of the oven but gets even better over the course of a few days.

Serves 8

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons ground ginger

1½ teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

¼ teaspoon kosher salt

¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg

¼ teaspoon ground cloves

⅛ teaspoon ground cardamom

1 cup unsulphured molasses

1 cup stout (such as Guinness)

½ teaspoon baking soda

12 tablespoons (1½ sticks) unsalted butter, melted

1 firmly packed cup dark brown sugar

1 cup granulated sugar

3 large eggs

Blood Orange Syrup (recipe follows)

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Spray a Bundt pan thoroughly with nonstick cooking spray. (A 6-cup Bundt pan will yield a taller cake; a 9-cup Bundt pan will yield a shorter cake.)

Sift together the flour, ginger, baking powder, cinnamon, salt, nutmeg, cloves, and cardamom in a large bowl and set aside. Combine the molasses and stout in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Remove the pan from the heat. Whisk the baking soda into the molasses-stout mixture and set aside.

Pour the melted butter into the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Add both sugars to the butter and beat until smooth. Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat until fluffy. Alternate adding the dry ingredients and the molasses-stout mixture to the butter mixture, mixing just until everything is incorporated.

Pour the batter into the greased Bundt pan and bake until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean, 40 to 50 minutes. Allow the cake to cool in the pan for at least 10 minutes before turning it out onto a cake stand or plate. Drizzle the cooled blood orange syrup over each piece of the cake immediately before serving.

BLOOD ORANGE SYRUP

Makes about 2 cups

1 cup sugar

1 cup water

Zest and juice of 2 blood oranges

Combine the sugar and water in a saucepan and heat over medium heat until the sugar dissolves. Add the blood orange zest and juice and bring to a boil; boil gently for 10 minutes. Strain the syrup and allow it to cool completely.