Tuesday 16 November 2010

Sugar and spice biscuits

I made these to take to the Glasgow Vegans potluck last night. I have yet to adjust to actually owning cookbooks, so this was done without an official recipe.

Dough in the bowl - the white stuff is flour to make it easier to shape individual biscuits. This mix involves about half a bowl of white self-raising flour, enough margarine to make 'breadcrumbs' when rubbed into the flour, a fairly obscene amount of muscavado sugar (the sticky dark brown stuff) and - as the name suggests - a fair bit of spice. This time round I used mostly ginger, but also cinnamon, cardamom and nutmeg. Getting it to the right consistency (sticking together but not runny) took about a mug and a half of water. This is also a good time to turn the oven on to preheat - 180 centigrade/celsius is my usual go-to temperature for such things.

The next step - after mixing the dough and flouring up it and your hands - is to shape the biscuits. This can be done by rolling it out on the table, but since I don't have any cookie cutters at the moment there wasn't much point. I just scooped out small lumps, rolled them into more-or-less neat balls, and squashed these to make something resembling a conventional biscuit shape. The mixture filled a large baking tray and two small ones. Then, predictably, I put them in the oven to bake.

After about 20 minutes (long enough to clean up the mess, haha) this was what came out. They puffed up enough to get mistaken for scones but tasted pretty good - my boy can testify to this! The little brown studded bits are lumps of sugar that didn't get broken up properly when mixing, I like them but your mileage may vary.

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