April recipe: Stem ginger biscuits

Ginger has been used in cookery for thousands of years, and is also supposed to have all sorts of health benefits. How much truth there is in this I have no idea – and I’m not about to conduct a meta-analysis to find out – but I like ginger anyway. So here’s a recipe for ginger biscuits (cookies) that uses ginger in two forms, preserved stem ginger and ground ginger. These are simple, quick to make (and even quicker to disappear), and the ingredients are available all year round.

Stem ginger biscuits

4 oz (approx 100 g) butter
2 tablespoons (2 x 15 ml spoons) golden syrup
1 oz (approx 25 g) sugar
2 oz (approx 50 g) stem ginger
6 oz (approx 150 g) self-raising flour
1 teaspoon (1 x 5 ml spoon) ground ginger

Chop the stem ginger into small pieces (about half the size of a raisin, or whatever size you prefer).
Put the butter, syrup and sugar in a saucepan and heat gently until the butter has melted and the sugar dissolved. Remove from the heat.
Stir in the flour, ground ginger and chopped stem ginger. Mix thoroughly. It should form a soft dough that leaves the sides of the pan clean.
Put teaspoonfuls of the mixture onto a greased baking tray, spaced about 1 inch (approx 2-3 cm) apart to allow room for the biscuits to spread as they cook. I usually get about 30 biscuits out of the quantities given, but you can make the biscuits larger or smaller according to taste.
Bake at about 180 C (approx 375 F) for about 15 minutes until the biscuits are golden brown and set.
Remove from the tray and cool on a wire rack.
Store in an airtight tin. If they get the chance, they keep for up to 2 weeks.

If you can’t get stem ginger, you can use crystallised (candied) ginger instead. If you don’t like pieces of ginger in biscuits, you can miss out the stem ginger and use 2 teaspoons of ground ginger.