Baking with gin, properly

The Gin Baker is about one narrow thing: what happens when gin goes into a bake rather than a glass. Most recipes that claim to use gin are using it as a label — a tablespoon stirred into an icing at the end, where it could just as well have been water. This site is interested in the other case, where the botanicals do real work: juniper against dark chocolate, coriander seed in a shortbread, citrus peel carried by the spirit into a syrup.

How the recipes are built

Every recipe on this site sets out where the gin goes, when it goes in, and what it is doing there. Alcohol boils off long before a cake is done, so anything that relies on the spirit surviving the oven has to be added after the bake or protected by fat or sugar. Where that matters, the recipe says so instead of leaving you to find out.

On the gin itself

We do not review bottles. A tasting note written without the bottle in front of you is fiction, and on a food site that is not a harmless kind of fiction. What you will find instead is guidance by style — what a juniper-forward London Dry does in a bake that a floral contemporary gin does not — which is the part that actually changes the result.

Drink responsibly

These recipes contain alcohol. Some of it cooks off and some of it does not. They are not intended for children, and they are not intended for anyone avoiding alcohol. Where a bake can be made without it, the recipe says how.