You have to love any recipe whose final ingredient is "1 chocolate cake (how you get it is your business)." But to quote my pal Tristram Shandy, I am getting ahead of myself.
Wednesday found me at home, taking a day off from the box factory, waiting for the delivery of the infamous new mattress, not in the sunniest of moods. I was still smarting over the change of plans for the Oxford Symposium, and sheepish over the sheer amount of rubbish and dustbunnies that managed to collect behind all the shelves we had to move in order to get the mattress through the door. The vacuum cleaners (yes, that's plural) that we usually stash behind our bedroom door were remanded to the bathroom, the better to open the bedroom door fully. Nearly everything in our apartment had been pushed to somewhere else in the apartment, and by the third hour of sitting quietly, knitting my sock and waiting for the doorbell to ring, I'd begun entertaining nightmare fantasies of the mattress never showing up, and Lloyd and I living in Fibber McGee-like squalor for the rest of our lives. Happily, this was not to be: at 11:30 the buzzer buzzed, at 11:40 the new mattress was sitting on the bed and the old one was being loaded onto the Sleepy's truck, and by 1 p.m. the apartment was back to its old self -- no, to a better, cleaner version of its old self. Instantly the day was better; the worst was behind me, and now I was free to take a little walk around the neighborhood, buy some lunch, and plan some nice leisurely dinner preparation.
Because I am normally in Manhattan, either at my desk or at the gym, at that hour, I had forgotten what a picture is my neighborhood in the afternoon, how full of activity are the sidewalks, how sundrenched are the side streets, how perfect is the view along Ditmars Boulevard from the Immaculate Conception belltower to the Hell Gate Bridge, how varied and plentiful and just plain good the food is. I bought fresh pasta sheets, cans of San Marzano tomatoes and two chicken breasts for chicken and pappardelle in tomato and mozzarella sauce. When I arrived at the Italian deli, the mozzarella was still warm, and I knew that half of a boule would be perfect for the sauce, which meant that I could have the other half for lunch, on a baguette with some sundried tomatoes and the muffaletta sauce I brought back from the King Arthur Flour store on my last trip to Vermont. As I stood in line to pay for everything, the question of dessert arose in my mind. I wondered if I had enough money to go back to the pasta place and get the traditional amaretti biscuits they sold; then my eye lit upon the shelf of preserves. Instantly my mind pinballed to a charming Google hit I had received the previous day, "How to prepare a good cake," and I knew, beyond all doubt, what we would be having for dessert.
I wish I could remember who wrote the lovely, lovely post I read over the weekend about ginger preserves, a sweet, jammy spread of preserved ginger cut into chunks and suspended in syrup. (Dear friends, if you remember reading this post, please do remind me where I found it, so that I might give credit where credit is due!) I found a jar of ginger preserves at a shockingly reasonable price, just right for bringing home and making room for it among the powdered ginger (which I buy in half-pound bags from Penzeys Spices) and the candied ginger (which I buy in bulk from Kalustyan's) and the pickled ginger (which I make from the recipe in China Moon Cookbook by the late Barbara Tropp) and the whole stem ginger in syrup (which I bought ten years ago in England, and which has held up beautifully ever since, stored in the coldest part of the fridge). You might think I have a little ginger problem, but ginger is not the problem. Ginger is the solution. 
Once home, I found what I was looking for in the May/June 1995 issue of Cooking on the Edge ("The Food Newsletter for Distracted People"
, the now-defunct food zine that I have never stopped loving, or missing. This particular issue featured editor/publisher Jill Cornfield's valentine to ginger as a key ingredient in Korean spinach, in soba noodles with a tamari/sesame/scallion/ginger sauce, in Ms. Cornfield's mother's stuffing for chicken, and in matzoh balls. But she doesn't stop at savories: In "A Cake with Snap," she describes her search for a true ginger cake (not gingerbread, which is typically a mixed spice cake in which ginger plays a prominent, but still ensemble-based role). Along the way, she realizes that the combination of chocolate and ginger is a wonderful thing, and thus does she create the Ginger-Glazed Chocolate Cake, in which a chocolate cake is brushed with melted ginger preserve (she recommends pureeing it in the food processor for smoothness) and glazed with a chocolate/butter ganache (4 tablespoons butter, 4 ounces semisweet chocolate).
The first time Ms. Cornfield made this, she used a fat-free chocolate pound cake. I'm sure that even with fat-free chocolate pound cake, this is quite a nice cake. I can confirm, though, that with a full-fat single-layer devil's food cake, it is magnificent. Normally, I am more of a fan of cocoa cakes than chocolate cakes. I agree with Rose Levy Beranbaum that cocoa plus boiling water is the most efficient chocolate flavor delivery system going, but sometimes you want to expand your horizons a bit, and you don't need the maximum one-two punch from your chocolate cake. In Nick Malgieri's Chocolate: From Simple Cookies to Extravagant Showstoppers (a book that holds a special place in my library -- but that is for another post), I found a recipe for something called Vermont Farmhouse Devil's Food Cake, which Chef Malgieri credits to Copeland Marks. It is a tender, sweet, subtly fruity cake, simply perfect for glazing with ginger preserve and then covering with a dark thin ganache. But you don't need this particular cake recipe: you can use the famous chocolate mayonnaise cake, a glossy black wonder; you can use a lowfat cocoa cake, soft and powdery; and I'll bet this would be truly something else with Red Velvet cake. How you get your cake, as Jill Cornfield writes, is your business. Just get your cake. Then make this one. You will not be sorry.