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This easy Gingerbread Cake recipe is topped with homemade vanilla cream sauce, bananas, and whipped cream. It could be my favorite holiday cake ever!
Do you love gingerbread? Try our Gingerbread Waffles, Ginger Molasses Cookies, Build a Gingerbread House, or make Gingerbread Cookies!
Why I love this cake:
- Light – The texture of this easy gingerbread cake is perfectly light, fluffy, and moist. Plus, your house will smell of freshly baked gingerbread.
- The Toppings – You must add a drizzle of the vanilla cream sauce, with sliced bananas and whipped cream, to get the full experience!
- Family Favorite – My mom shared this recipe with me from one of her best friends (thanks Kristen!) and its been a highlight of our season ever since.
How to make Gingerbread Cake:
Mix Wet Ingredients: Cream the sugar and butter until smooth. Add the eggs and molasses then mix well.
Stir Dry Ingredients: In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, cloves and salt. Combine the wet and dry ingredients then slowly pour in the hot water and stir until smooth.
Bake: Pour batter into a 9”x 13” pan. Bake gingerbread cake for 20-35 minutes.
Serve: This classic gingerbread cake recipe is delicious by itself (and totally acceptable to eat it as a stand-alone), but I just can't resist the combination of fresh bananas, whipped cream, and the most amazing warm vanilla cream sauce drizzled on top. It's outstanding!
Make Ahead, Storage, and Freezing Instructions:
To Make Ahead: The vanilla cream sauce can be made a few days in advance, stored in the fridge in an airtight container. Rewarm before serving.
To Store: The ginger cake recipe keeps well at room temperature for 2 days, or in the fridge for about a week.
To Freeze: Wrap the gingerbread cake in plastic wrap then aluminum foil, and place in a freezer safe bag or airtight container. Freeze for up to 2 months. Let thaw overnight at room temperature before serving. If you'd like it warm, heat it in the microwave for a few seconds.
More Christmas Treats:
- Peppermint Brownies
- Chocolate Fudge
- Homemade Caramels
- Gingerbread Cookies
- Chocolate Peppermint Bundt Cake
- Red Velvet Bundt Cake
- Super Soft Sugar Cookies
- Chocolate Raspberry Cake
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Recipe
Gingerbread Cake
Ingredients
Gingerbread Cake:
- 1/2 cup granulated sugar
- 1/2 cup butter
- 1 large egg , beaten
- 1 cup unsulphered molasses
- 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon ground ginger
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup very hot water
- bananas for topping
- fresh whipped cream , for topping
Vanilla Cream Sauce:
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- 1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
- 1 cup heavy whipping cream
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 9×13” pan with cooking spray.
- In a large mixing bowl, cream together sugar and butter until smooth and light.
- Add the egg and molasses then mix well. In a separate bowl, mix the dry ingredients together: flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and salt.
- Add dry ingredients to the wet mixture and stir to combine. Slowly pour in the hot water and stir until smooth (batter will be thin).
- Pour batter into prepared pan and bake for 20-35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean.
- Serve warm, topped with fresh sliced bananas, whipped cream, and vanilla cream sauce.
For the Vanilla Cream Sauce:
- Add sugar, butter and cream to a medium saucepan over medium heat. Cook, stirring occasionally, until butter has melted.
- Bring mixture to a boil then boil, stirring frequently, for 3-5 minutes. Remove from heat and add vanilla.
- Allow to cool for a few minutes before serving over cake.
Notes
Nutrition
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*I originally shared this recipe November 2015. Updated December 2018 and December 2023.
I don’t understand what I did wrong, my batter came out so dry.. I put all the ingredients you said except I used honey instead of molasses.. could that be the issue?
This was so yummy. Easy too. Thanks for this awesome recipe.
Lauren! These recipes takes me back,over 50 plus years, when I learned to cook from my mother, aunts, and grandmother! I’m from a small community, that was founded by my ancestors, called:Barrett,Station,Texas. They were freed slaves! I’m currently writing a book on my Life Story!
This recipe need a 1C of sugar as opposed to 1/2 C of sugar. It was not sweet at all. Secondly, the recipe says “45m cook time” and there is verbiage about 25m – that needs to be corrected. My cake took about 50m to be done.
If you like gingerbread like I do you will love this cake! I certainly can’t have a lot of it though because it is so rich and sweet! Especially if you add the vanilla cream sauce on top which honestly, I don’t think would be necessary. Maybe even a little whipped cream would be enough but that cream sauce just makes it so sweet! Insanely delicious though!
I weigh Al my ingredients when baking. I put in stem ginger, which you can make yourself, cut sugar to half. It is very good but needs stem ginger to give it texture and deliciousness.
This recipe is amazing! Light airy and just the right amount of molasses. I topped it with a caramel whiskey sauce. Perfect!
I did same as Karen , weighed flour and sugar, halved molasses, 2 TB each of ginger and cinnamon , 1 teaspoons crushed cloves, zest from mandarin as i has no oranges and diced up my homemade stem ginger, about 2 tablespoons. Baked for exact 22 minutes and it came out perfectly.
Wish I had read the comments before baking — as others have pointed out, the baking time is way too long. At 30 minutes this was very burnt all around the edges and on the bottom. A real shame as the texture looked amazing. I am puzzled why the recipe has not been edited with instructions to begin checking at 20 minutes.
It does say baking time is 20 to 35 minutes..ovens are all different. I check cakes at 20 minutes and work from there.
It says so because the recipe has since been edited 🙂
The original instructions were for 35-40 minutes, as corroborated by others’ comments and website archiving sites like wayback machine (yeah… I had to double-check because I thought I was losing my mind when the text changed and the recipe’s Updated Date didn’t).
Plus, if you look through the whole recipe (pictures and all) the text still reads:
“Stir until smooth and poor the batter into a 9”x 13” pan. Bake the gingerbread cake for 35-40 minutes and serve it warm, topped with vanilla cream sauce.” That probably should also be corrected.
To be clear, I am not trying to be mean to the author and I am happy that your bake turned out great, just trying to save some other person the sadness of throwing a whole pan of cake into the trash.
You’re right, I did adjust the time (because as Lexi said, all ovens vary, and it’s up to the baker to check. I give estimates based on what works for me in my testing). I didn’t feel the need to change the update date since the time span now encompasses all those who might have had it cook sooner, or later.
i made this for my high school cooking and it was amazing