December Micro Bake Off: Starbucks Copycat Gingerbread Loaf
Can we recreate the industrial goodness at home?
For years, people have politely slid into my DMs requesting a gingerbread LOAF bake off (not to be confused with a gingerbread cookie bake off).
As a not-huge-fan-of-gingerbread (which you may be able to sense from the below commentary, I kept this on the low priority section of my bake off to-do list. But when someone specifically requested a Starbucks copycat gingerbread loaf bake off, it seemed like the perfect subject for a micro bake off.
Note: Given the boycott against Starbucks, I wanted to explicitly clarify that this is not meant to be some sort of a political statement in support of Starbucks. In fact, the goal is to reverse engineer some of the secrets behind this popular baked good so we can make it at home instead.
Recipe Overviews
Helpfully, Starbucks does post their entire ingredient list online. This made it easier to assess what kind of recipes I should be looking for—i.e. ones with applesauce, molasses, and buttermilk. (Spoiler: I couldn’t find a recipe that used all three.) While there are quite a few copycat recipes on the internet, the grand majority were all fairly similar. You can see the spreadsheet of all the recipes I inspected here.
Interestingly, Starbucks’ loaf doesn’t use any vegetable oil (an ingredient that I’d think would be key for the moist loaf texture). I was surprised that applesauce was the second-highest quantity ingredient on the list, coming in far higher than butter. I was also intrigued to see palm oil shortening quite low on the list. Because it’s listed between spices or baking powder, this means it’s probably used in a tiny quantity. So I suspect just a little bit may be used in the icing.
Courtney’s Sweets
This butter-based recipe is one of the top recipes on Google and uses molasses (but no applesauce or buttermilk).
Recipe characteristics include:
Creamed butter and light brown sugar
2/3 cup molasses is thinned with hot water before being added to the batter
Spice mix = equal parts ginger and cinnamon to 1/3 amount of nutmeg
Simple powdered sugar icing with cinnamon
Noshing with the Nolands
I was most excited about this recipe as it uses both applesauce and sour cream (a close cousin to buttermilk), though I wished it also included molasses. This was the only recipe to use fresh grated ginger.
Recipe characteristics include:
Creamed butter with white and brown sugar
Fresh ginger, applesauce and sour cream
Thick vanilla cream cheese icing (just cream cheese, vanilla, powdered sugar)
The Seasoned Mom
Another recipe that included two out of the three main ingredients I was looking for, The Seasoned Mom includes sour cream and molasses, but no applesauce. I was most skeptical of the scant 1/2 cup of dark brown sugar in this recipe, but the crumb looked quite good!
Recipe characteristics include:
Creamed butter and dark brown sugar
Sour cream, molasses, milk
Icing is a simple powdered sugar glaze with citrus juice (orange or lemon)
After distributing the loaves to 14 different tasters, here were the results
THE CONTROL
Starbucks
Let’s start by analyzing the original. I knew it would be hard to replicate the perfect crumb of a mass-produced loaf at home. It has an extremely even, close, pleasingly squishy crumb that’s quite moist. I was surprised by how mild the spice mix was—ginger is the prominent flavor (but still not very prominent) with just a hint of molasses.
The thin layer of icing is sticky (I suspect this is where the corn syrup is used) with a surprising citrus-y hint of cardamom. Overall, the comfortingly soft and squishy loaf is my perfect texture, but I was surprised by how muted the overall gingerbread effect was.
Taster comments:
A very ginger forward, spicy cake (appealing) though it did posses an overall mass produced, processed taste. Found it oily yet dry at the same time.
Nice moist, dense texture. Very comforting snack to eat. Nice spice flavor, but nothing too overpowering or creative. The bit of frosting is welcome but doesn't add much in terms of flavor. The cake does have that sort of vague industrial taste.
This sample has a nice crumb and is decently moist, with a very sticky frosting. The flavor of both the cake and the icing was very sweet and tasted like general autumn spices, with only a mild ginger flavor.
Fairly mild overall, not a punchy gingerbread flavor, more subtle and not a super sweet flavor either. texture is a little dry, overall just very basic
The flavor is subtle and the notes of gingerbread are present in a way that is not too faint or strong. It is delightful and although I am not a fan of the icing on top, which tastes extremely sweet to me, it was a nice texture - especially with the loaf. The loaf itself is sublime with what seems to be some orange that pairs nicely with the spice.
Dense but still moist. I liked that I could taste the warming spices but they weren’t overwhelming - of all the loaves, I preferred Starbucks’ flavor profile (shocking!) I disliked that the texture was a bit mealy
