I cannot lay claim to this recipe unfortunately. My angel of a husband came home last night clutching a package from a book shop and thrust it at me ."Got you a pressie" he says. "YAY" say's I.
On opening I discover the book in question is "The Great British Book of Baking". This book is to accompany the BBC series The Great British Bake Off which I have been watching avidly for the last few weeks. The whole series has been inspiring me to cook even more than usual which seems to please everyone!
Well on opening this book last night, I spy the first recipe is Stem Gingernuts. Had a quick glance through the ingredients and thought excellent, have all the ingredients, lets give that one a go.
The ingredients are as follows.
350g self raising flour
1 tablespoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
200g caster sugar
115g unsalted butter
85g golden syrup
1 medium free range egg, beaten
2 pieces of stem ginger, drained and finely chopped
3 baking trays, greased with butter.
Method
Preheat the oven to 170 degrees C
Sift the flour, ground ginger, bicarbonate of soda into a mixing bowl.
In a saucepan melt the butter along with the syrup, be fairly gentle with this.I boiled my mixture last time and the cookies seemed none the worse for it. Pop this mixture to one side to cool slightly, or a lot if you over did it like me!!!
Once it has cooled a little chuck it in to the bowl with your dry ingredients, add your egg and your chopped ginger and mix away. It does seem a little dry at first but it will mix don't worry.
Once you have mixed your bits together you need to make around 24 walnut sized ball of mixture and pop them onto your prepared trays. Not too close together, give them a bit of room to spread. With the best will in the world I have never managed to get 24 perfect walnut sized balls of cookie dough, usually I end up with between 18 and 26. Funnily enough they are rarely the same size! If this happens to you try and put the larger ones in the top of your oven and the smaller ones lower down, that way hopefully things will cook relatively evenly. That said it is definitely worth checking them frequently. Depending on your oven you may need to turn them around halfway through cooking to get an even bake.
These cookies can take anywhere between 10 and 20 minutes so check regularly. No wandering off and multi tasking as I did last week. Best bet, make yourself a cup of tea and by the time it is cool enough to drink your cookies may very well be done.
Get the little beauties out and leave them to cool on their baking trays for a couple of minutes before transferring them onto a cooling rack. These should be stored in an airtight container. I have no idea how long these keep as they have not been in the house for more than 24 hours before being consumed. Very very moorish.
When I made these the other day I decided that they would almost certainly be even better with a drizzle of plain chocolate over them. I was right. Melt about 50g of dark chocolate in the microwave or over a double boiler and then drizzle over your cookies as required. I usually do around half with chocolate and leave the other half plain.
Enjoy.
Thursday, 16 September 2010
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