Salted Date Cake with Ginger Toffee Sauce

This recipe was created by Caitlin Carrick-Varty (@cake.onmyface), who is an artist, baker and storyteller. She wrote a blog, Cake On My face, of baking recipes in letters to her brother from 2018-2024. Now, she is writing about what she is baking in her kitchen on her substack.

We’ve teamed up with Caitlin to make a delicious salted date cake, paired with a delicious ginger toffee sauce.

This cake is a meeting of salted caramel, sticky toffee pudding, and the fluffy, damp kind of ginger cake from English lineage. There is nothing – actually nothing – more joyful than toffee sauce and warm, dark cake. Sea salt is key in this, amongst all that sweetness, and helps the small amount of cardamom sing through. Caitlin adds ginger too, for a little heat under the salted and caramelised sauce – she’s got a tub of the stuff in her fridge and knowing that, makes her feel slightly more prepared for life!

Here is how to make her salted date cake with ginger toffee sauce

1. Preheat the oven to 180 / 160 fan.
2. Add the dates, water, and bicarb to a bowl and stir once or twice, cover with a plate and set aside.
3. Grease and line, with baking paper, a 9-inch square baking tin. You can use a slightly different size tin, just keep an eye on the baking time.
4. In a large bowl, cream the butter, sugar and vanilla extract until the mix is lighter and fluffed up around the sides of the bowl. A wooden spoon will work, electric beaters will be quicker. Beat in one egg until fully combined, then the other.
5. Take the bowl of dates and use a fork to mash them up a bit in the water. Pour the whole lot into the butter mixer, along with the flour, baking powder, Maldon salt, and cardamom. Mix until a liquid batter forms.
6. Pour into the prepared tin and bake for 30 mins, or until a skewer inserted into the cake comes out with just a few crumbs attached.
7. When the cake is out of the oven you can whip up the sauce, it’s quick-quick. Melt all the sauce ingredients, except the cream and ground ginger, in a saucepan over medium heat. Stir with a spatula to help it on its way. Allow to simmer for 2 mins, this is to cook the ginger and get a darker colour to the sauce. Take the pan off the heat, stir in the cream and ground ginger, and put back on the heat to bubble for a further minute or so.
8. Prick the cake all over with a toothpick or skewer, and pour over about a third of the hot sauce. If you can wait, allow the cake to sit like this, in the tin, for 15 mins.
9. Slice into big wedges and serve with double cream if you want, whipped or poured straight out the tub, and some of the extra sauce for good measure.  

Notes – You can make the sauce in advance and heat up as and when you need it (what a sentence). Cool completely at room temp before storing in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 3 days.