Cookbook challenge, week 38: Gingerbread

The theme for week 38 was spice, and although cooking a curry or marinated meat was very tempting I decided to cook something sweet as it's quite some time since my last sweet recipe for the cookbook challenge (in fact, the last time was week 24!).
I chose a recipe from a new book, Cook's Bible by Lorraine Turner, which I found on special at Habitat recently. The recipe is a cake version of gingerbread.

Ingredients:
150g butter
175g soft brown sugar
2 tbs black treacle (I used golden syrup)
225g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp bicarb soda
2 tsp ground ginger
150mL milk
1 egg, beaten
1 tsp finely chopped fresh ginger
2 apples, peeled, chopped and coated with 1 tbs lemon juice (I used 1/3 cup of date puree that I needed to use up)

Melt the butter, sugar and treacle/syrup in a saucepan over low heat and leave to cool.
Preheat the oven to 160ºC and grease and line a 23cm square or 22cm round cake tin.
Sift the flour, baking powder, bicarb and ground ginger into a bowl.
Stir in the milk, egg, fresh ginger and cooled butter mixture, followed by the apples/date puree.
Mix everything together gently, then pour the mixture into the prepared tin and smooth the surface.
Bake for 30-35 minutes (my cake took 45 minutes).
Remove from the oven and cool in the tin.

It's a lovely, moist cake with a wonderfully zingy ginger flavour. It's great as is, but for a special occasion it would be fantastic with a thin layer of orange or lemon icing.