Gingernut Biscuits

These are by far and beyond my favourite holiday baked treat. And I’m finally (for 3 more months) in a country where you can enjoy these in the right cultural and physical season, yay! There’s something just not quite right about gingernuts at Christmas… on the beach.

I’ve been tweaking my gingernut recipe on and off for years now. This recipe doesn’t use molasses (which are had to put your hands on in NZ or the UK) and the dough is only cooled in the fridge for 30minutes – or, just enough time to finish getting ready for the week to come! (Or watching X-Files, whatever floats your boat)

I always use either dark brown sugar or a combination of dark and light brown sugar – never white in gingernut biscuits. I think it helps with the depth of colour and complements the ginger.

TIP: Make sure you take the butter out of the fridge in the morning to ensure it’s soft enough to cream!Cream Butter, Dark Brown Sugar, Egg, Golden Syrup and Vanilla. The softer your butter is and the smaller you cut it, the easier it will be to cream! Use an electric whisk if you have one (I don’t, but it takes 5-10 minutes by hand). I measure my dark brown sugar by ¼ cups – easier to a. get in the bag of sugar and b. make sure it’s packed down nicely.

Sift in spices, flour and baking powder (aka the rest of the ingredients). With one cup of flour mixed in, it should be at about mousse texture (left). 

Continue to add flour until the dough is not sticky to touch – until you could roll a small ball of dough without it sticking to your hands. I add flour one tablespoon at a time when I’m close to the right texture, to ensure it doesn’t end up crumbly.

Form a log/block with the dough and wrap well in clingwrap (right). Set in the fridge for at least 30 minutes – it can stay in the fridge, in my experience for up to 24 hours.

Prior to removing the dough from the fridge, turn the oven on to 180c and bake. Once the dough is chilled, take a chunk at a time – I tend to split the dough into roughly 5 sections, to make it easier to roll out. Think about how crispy you would like your biscuits – this will influence how thin you roll out your biscuits. Chilling the dough means these biscuits don’t spread once baking, so the size and thickness of your biscuits is very much determined by how you roll and cut them. I like a crispier biscuit, that will ‘snap’ when you bite it, but I know R likes a slightly chewier biscuit, so I usually do some of each. Remember that the thinner your biscuit, the quicker it will bake, so keep an eye on the first couple of batches, and don’t be afraid to take a couple of thinner biscuits out before the others. It’s always and idea to keep an eye on these first time anyway, as your oven may have a different idea of what 180c is than mine. I bake these for 18-22 minutes, depending how thick they are – but I’d suggest keeping an eye on them after 15 minutes the first time you try them!

The number of biscuits this will make will vary based on how thick your biscuits are and the size of biscuits. It makes me somewhere around 35 biscuits – a lot, but I love them so much! Do you have a favourite biscuit recipe? I actually have two – have a look at my favourite traditional New Zealand biscuit – Hokey Pokey Biscuits! Let me know if you try this recipe/if I need to add any information! Be sure to link me to any pictures!