I've never used a molded cake pan before, and this one doesn't come with instructions, so I read up on some advice for how to use them: grease well, and flour to keep the batter from sticking in the tiny crevices; cook about 25 degrees Fahrenheit lower than the recipe calls for, and for longer; and make sure the batter settles well into the pan and sets up before you remove it.
Having some leftover ingredients, I went back to one of my favorite recipes, a pumpkin gingerbread dough that normally makes 2 bread-sized loaves. I make a few modifications to it, though - use 1/2 cup applesauce and 1/2 cup oil, instead of a full cup oil, and at least double all of the spices listed, or it will be far too bland. You can also throw in some fresh grated ginger, along with the dried ginger.
Not knowing quite how much batter should go into the mold, I hedged at about 3/4 full, and put the rest into muffin tins. I cooked it at 325 degrees F, instead of 350; the muffins came out after 20 minutes, while the cake itself cooked for almost 1 hour 45 minutes, but could probably have come out a bit sooner if I was in a hurry.
Turns out, for this recipe at least, I could have fit the whole 2 loaves' worth of batter into the tin, but now I know that for the future. It also turns out this pan is super non-stick, and I probably would have been just fine with oiling it and not dusting with flour, which turned into the yellow highlights you can see as it came out of the mold.
Since I was planning on glazing it anyway, the unsightly flour didn't make much difference, but if it doesn't upset the flavor balance, you can dust for darker-colored cakes with cocoa powder rather than flour.
I find this gingerbread works best with an orange glaze to set off the spices, but getting the right consistency of glaze is more important for a molded cake than a regular one, where you want to keep the features visible. I settled on this icing recipe, with about 1/4 of a large orange's zest grated in to give it the right flavor. I needed to use almost twice as much milk as the recipe called for to get it to the right consistency, where it would pour and stick but not flow down into all the hollows on the cake.
It took longer than I expected, and the food coloring softened the icing and made it a bit runny again, but it wasn't hard to work around.
Having only 4 colors limited my palette a bit - using gel food coloring would give much brighter colors, and would allow you to mix them on a plate to produce different combinations.
Still, it turned out better than expected, and I now have a feel for how to do it next time - I just need another excuse to use it.
Edit: I've made it a few more times, trying out different recipes and colors. Moist cakes (like the one above) seem to take extra long to cook; standard cakes, like from cake mixes, take a bit longer than the posted recipe; drier cakes, like pound cakes, you need to watch to keep from overcooking, as they don't take as long as you would expect. I suppose that's one of the joys of working with cake molds: the standard recipes do not apply.
