Ginger biscuits and beyond.

Growing up my favourite biscuit was a custard cream, closely followed by a gingernut. Custard creams are delectable sandwich biscuits with a 'custard' filling and the correct way to eat these is to prize them apart and scrape the 'custard' off one half, I suppose they are like an Oreo in that respect. Gingernuts are a harder biscuit and need a good dunking in coffee or tea to soften them up before you eat them or they are liable to cause damage.

There is something very satisfying about dunking a biscuit and then eating it, and it really seems to be a British thing to do. I remember introducing the art of dunking to my Japanese co-workers when I was there, and the expression of surprise/delight accompanied with a muffled "Oishii" said it all. Delia Smith has a great recipe for gingernuts in her book "Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course", the cornerstone of any cook book collection, chocked full of tried and tested recipes which never fail. 

Here is her recipe as it is in the book.

Gingernuts

4oz (110g) self-raising flour*

1 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp bicarb of soda (baking soda)

1.5oz (40g) of granulated sugar

2oz (50g) butter

2 tbsp golden syrup

Preheat the oven to gas mark 5, 375F or 190C (175C for Fan ovens). Grease one or two large baking sheets and dust with flour.

Begin by sifting the flour, ginger and bicarb into a mixing bowl, add the sugar, then lightly rub in the butter until the mixture is crumbly. Next add the syrup and mix everything together to form a stiff paste.

Now divide the mixture into 16 pieces about the same size as each other, and roll each piece into a little ball. Place them on the baking sheet, leaving plenty of room between them because they spread out. The simply flatten each ball slightly with the back of a spoon and bake just above the centre of the oven for 10-15 (I found 12 was perfect), by which time they will have spread out and cracked rather attractively. Cool on the baking sheet for 10 minutes, then transfer to a wire wrack to finish cooling, store in an air-tight tin.

*self-raising flour has a raising agent mixed into it in the correct proportions for cake baking

Now these turned out fantastic and Delia was right in her blurb where she said that when you first make them you wonder why you ever bought them before.

Alchemaic Baking

In my bid to come up with some original takes on classic recipes I decided to ransack my parents pantry and see what spices and flavours they had in there. I pulled out, stem ginger in syrup, chinese 5 spice, black treacle and sweet mixed spices.

Substituting them into the above recipe was really easy, just take out the ginger and golden syrup and replace it with the following:

Stem gingernuts

• 3 tbsp of the syrup from the jar
• 2 pieces of the ginger diced very finely

5 Spicenuts

• 1 tsp of 5 spice
• 2 tbsp black treacle

Mixed spicenuts

• 2 tsp of mixed spice
• 2 tbsp of golden syrup

The results were really great, I think the stem gingernuts were on par with some of the finer range of biscuits you can get in shops. The mixed spice ones were still not flavoursome enough and could have done with some more spice in them, another tsp perhaps. The 5 spice and treacle ones were very interesting, Mum described them as tasting like a glass of Pernod, and if you like the aniseed flavour that the fennel seed brings then try them out.

I shall make the stem ginger ones again and sandwich them together with a light, slightly spiced, cream cheese frosting. 

I shall also try out maple syrup with cinnamon as the spice.

I used a decent camera for most of these photo's and tried to actually set up a shot for them too. I feel the last one in the greenhouse sets a story up of someone taking a break from potting plants and having a read of some well thumbed books with a cup of tea and biscuit.