Welcome to Kitchen Queries, where the nigella.com team will answer your cooking or food related questions.  We’d love you to submit some of your recipe problems, dilemmas or queries for us to get our teeth into!

Please note, we are only able to answer questions selected for publication and aren't able to enter into personal correspondence.

• Sticky Gingerbread

  Whenever I make the sticky gingerbread recipe from Nigella Christmas I always get lumps of flour in my batter which won't mix in, I have to push the mixture through a sieve before baking. Am I doing something wrong? I follow the recipe exactly!

  Posted by Park. Answered on 25th Jul 2012 at 12.00

  From the nigella team:

  When a large amount of liquid is added to flour sometimes the flour will tend to form the odd small lump. In some recipes, such as muffin recipes, this is considered to be a positive as the batter is not overmixed and the resulting muffins are usually light in texture.

  If the gingerbread batter has just a few small lumps then you can usually ignore them and they will tend to disappear as the cake is baked. If they worry you then you can either whisk the mixture with a wire whisk to break down the lumps or you could start off by adding enough liquid to the flour to make a thick paste and then stirring in the remainder.

  Add Bookmark facebook twitter Print share