These Gingerbread Cupcakes with sweet cream cheese frosting are deliciously moist and festive. With the most cherished of old-world Christmas flavours – sweet from treacle and dark brown sugar, warming from ginger, cloves and allspice. They are a scrumptious teatime treat and perfect to have on-hand during the Christmas holidays. No Christmas is complete without these super delicious Christmas cakes!

Gingerbread cupcake is a soft and super delicious festive cake with bold treacle flavour, accompanied with sweet warm Christmas spices.

Everyone needs an excellent Gingerbread Cupcake recipe in their baking toolbox. A good recipe yields moist yet a slightly dense sponge with a delicious taste of treacle that is not overpowering in the slightest.

Rich and buttery these Gingerbread Cupcakes are made with treacle syrup, dark brown sugar and butter melted in a pan – an important step to ensure these ingredients are mixed well before adding to the dry ingredients.

I love the dark colour of these Gingerbread Cupcakes along with deep flavours, but if you want lighter cupcakes, you may opt for golden syrup and light brown sugar instead.

These cupcakes have the taste and scent of simple ground warm spices which are typically used during Christmas for desserts, sweets and cakes – ginger, allspice, ground cloves.

Feel free to experiment with your favourite sweet spices, but ginger of course, is the key spice in these cupcakes. In addition to ground ginger, I have also added some chopped stem ginger (preserved ginger or crystallised ginger) to amp up the ginger flavour.

These Gingerbread Cupcakes take on a magnificent flavour that improves a day or two after baking and fyi unfrosted cakes (my son likes it frosted though) make a perfect breakfast treat during the holidays.

Deep down I love cream cheese, and I love to top my Gingerbread Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting. My husband loves these cupcakes without the frosting, as they are delicious eaten even without the frosting. If there is anyone in your home that does not like frosting, make sure to keep a few aside for them. They will thank you for them!!

Over the Christmas holiday period, along with some Indian traditional Christmas sweets, I always bake a fruit cake or loaf, some shortbread and this year, because I love gingerbread cupcakes, I thought I will add Gingerbread Cupcakes to my baking repertoire.

These Gingerbread Cupcakes with Cream Cheese frosting are my artistic triumph for the year.

So, turn up the Christmas tunes and let’s bake and decorate your very own gingerbread cupcakes!

Whether you produce a stunning Christmas centrepiece or an epic Instagram failure, the most important thing is to have a great time and enjoy this festive baking!!

My fascination of gingerbread took me on a reading journey that you have no idea how long it took! I enjoyed learning about this sweet-spiced cookie and cake and excited to share this knowledge with you. Hope you enjoy reading and learning how long it dates back!!

Gingerbread likely came from Europe!

History has it that gingerbread was a popular treat throughout Europe, especially at fairs. It goes back to the late Middle Ages (1300AD -1500AD), where Europeans baked a version of gingerbread in the form of hard cookies, shaping them into animals or kings and queens.

According to Steven Stellingwerf’s “The Gingerbread Book,” this spiced cake may have been brought to Europe by 11th-century crusaders coming back from the eastern Mediterranean.

Gingerbread is essentially baked in two forms: a moist, cake-like version and a harder, flatter sometimes crispier kind associated with cookies or biscuits.

Some years later, Queen Elizabeth the First of England had an idea for a new kind of cookie. In her palace, she had royal gingerbread makers, whose only job was to make gingerbread!

They baked cookies that looked like the queen’s friends and other world leaders. When people visited, the queen gave them cookies that looked like them! Many people say that Queen Elizabeth invented gingerbread men.

Gingerbread Men were first served in the court of Elizabeth I.

Queen Elizabeth is known to have decorated her cookies with gold leaves, inspiring festivals that came to be known as Gingerbread Fairs. The cookies were called “fairlings” and their shapes would be seasonal – flowers for spring, animals for autumn and birds for fall.

The bakers in Germany started making gingerbread houses, who may have got the idea from an old German story. The story was about a witch who lived in a house made of gingerbread and candy.

In the early 1800s, the Grimm brothers wrote a new version of that story and called it “Hansel and Gretel.” In the story, the children come upon a gingerbread house as they walk through the forests. The story became very popular–and so did gingerbread houses!

Gingerbread houses are a favourite at Christmas fairs around Germany.

The German gingerbread cookies and cakes are irresistibly light and full of aromatic spices. “Pfefferneusse”, a German gingerbread cookie, often contains black pepper, along with the usual seasonings. “Lebkuchen”, another cookie, traditionally is made with honey and light brown sugar instead of molasses and dark brown sugar.

In Germany, the tradition of gingerbread houses continues. Some German families still keep up another aspect of the tradition. On New Year’s Day, the children of the household are given small mallets, which they use to break the holiday gingerbread houses apart. They then eat the pieces to usher in the new year or they feed the gingerbread to birds.

It’s believed some form of gingerbread existed in ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt.

A cake-like gingerbread called “piernik“ in Poland is popular at Christmas, that’s known to be around since 13th century.

Similarly, “Pain d’epices“, or spice bread, is a French cake that sometimes includes ginger.

The shapes may have changed over the past thousand years, but the taste remains the same. Gingerbread cookies and Gingerbread Cupcakes are still a scrumptious treat to enjoy whether on a cold winter’s day or on a hot summer’s day!!!

I bake Gingerbread Cupcakes all year round and they are devoured time and time again!!

In this version of the Gingerbread cupcakes, you will need a few ingredients which are pantry and spice cupboard staples, except for the preserved ginger and treacle syrup.

Here’s what goes into making the Gingerbread Cupcakes:

• Self-raising flour – Remember to use a scale and weigh your flour correctly. A good trick is to whisk the flour well while it is still in the flour jar, then spoon it into a large bowl and then weigh. Whisking first loosens the flour to get the correct weight.

• Dark brown sugar – Love the dark colour of my cupcakes. It comes from a combination of treacle syrup and dark brown sugar. Substitute: Equal quantity of light brown sugar. The cakes will be of a lighter shade, but the flavour and taste remain the same.

• Room temperature milk – Helps combine the dry and wet ingredients easily. Also adds moisture and a layer of depth to the cakes. I have used full cream milk and not skim or low-fat milk. Substitute: Same quantity of buttermilk (also adds depth and makes the cupcakes soft).

• The ground spices – A combination of allspice, ginger and cloves together are the key spices that give that perfect warm gingerbread taste. Check to make sure your spices are within their due date for best results.

• Salted butter – For flavour and moisture. I have used salted butter, but if you stock only unsalted butter, it works well too. Just add a pinch of salt, if you are using unsalted butter.

• Bi-Carb soda – As I already use self-raising flour, a little Bi-Carb soda helps the cakes rise slightly with a lighter texture. Substitute: With ½ tsp. baking powder and ½ tsp. Bi-Carb soda.

• Preserved Ginger – Along with ground ginger, boosts the gingerbread flavour in another form. Oozes sweet, spicy and zesty ginger flavour. My favourite brand is Buderim Preserved Ginger. Find at: The Nut Shop, The Strand Arcade, Sydney. You can also buy it online from Victoria’s basement. Substitute: Same quantity of Buderim Ginger (200g packs) – crystallised ginger coated in crunch, available in the cake section of Woolworths supermarket or Buderim naked ginger also at Woolworths.

• Vanilla Bean Paste – Adds a subtle flavour and enhances the flavour of other ingredients. Substitute: Same quantity of pure vanilla extract.

• Treacle Syrup – A dark sweet syrup created during the process of refining sugar. Adds a rich festive gingerbread flavour, intense colour and mildly smoky aroma. A key ingredient, and an excellent sweetener. Find at: Woolworths and Coles supermarkets. My favourite brand is CSR Treacle Syrup. Substitute: If you can’t source treacle, don’t panic. Use equal quantity of golden syrup instead of treacle. The cakes will be lighter in colour but who cares? I love them both light and dark!!!

• Eggs – For this recipe, it works better if the eggs are at room temperature. Before prepping the other ingredients, remove the eggs from the fridge. By the time you measure the other ingredients, the eggs will come to room temperature.