Yet another recipe from my favourite book, Ladies, A Plate. These cookies are called spice biscuits, but are very similar to gingernuts, just with spices additional to ginger added. Gingernuts are (I think) an iconic New Zealand biscuit and are commercially made by Griffins. Griffins gingernuts are very very hard and are often dunked in tea before eating – doesn’t sound very appealing to me. My mother loves gingernuts though and that is one thing she craved when she was pregnant with my second to youngest sister.
I personally don’t like bought gingernuts – I don’t really like bought biscuits at all, but a nice home made gingernut is delicious. These spice biscuits were delicious and very easy to make. The balls of raw cookie dough are rolled in sugar before baking. I always use castor sugar in any baking that I do, regardless of what the recipe says, but for these you would definitely need to use castor sugar in the rolling phase I think. Otherwise, you would end up with large chunks of sugar which wouldn’t be great. I did make these as part of my hospice baking, but my husband ate his way through half the batch which is saying something as he doesn’t like ginger flavoured things. I have adapted the original recipe slightly, adjusting the spice quantities and using golden syrup instead of treacle
Last night’s dinner was lamb steaks – this is usually the cut of lamb I buy for a week day lamb dinner. I rubbed the steaks with some olive oil and cinnamon (I find lamb goes well with North African flavours such as cinnamon), pan fried the steaks and served them with a cous cous salad of cous cous tossed with peas (I used frozen and added them to the cous cous before pouring over the boiling water), almonds and sliced preserved lemon. We had baked eggplant and green beans on the side. Quick, easy and yummy.
Spice Crisps (adapted from Ladies, A Plate)
170g butter
200g sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg
100g golden syrup
280g flour
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ground ginger
extra sugar for rolling
· Cream butter and sugar, beat in egg and vanilla
· Mix in remaining ingredients (other than the extra sugar)
· Roll into balls and then roll each ball in castor sugar and place on tray. Don’t flatten
· Bake at 190c for 10-12 minutes. They will flatten as they bake
· Leave on trays for about 10 minutes and then cool on racks.
6 comments:
these look so yummy. I like gingernuts but surely homemade are the best :)
With your recommendation on this cookbook, I may add it to my growing collection! Thanks
Mmm, these cookies sound wonderful, and judging from your husband's reaction, they're quite addictive as well! Sounds like a great recipe to me!
How funny - I made these last week, and haven't posted about them yet. Yours turned out better than mine - I think that mine needed longer in the oven than the 8-10 minutes quoted.
I found you through cakelaw and what a very lovely site you have here! I will be back to visit again :0)
Your cookies look very srummy and this is a must try recipe. Thanks for sharing.
Those cookies look wonderful! I was just thinking this morning that I need to make some nice simple cookies. I haven't baked cookies in awhile.
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