Saturday, August 27, 2011

Taste & Create: Ginger Cake Cookies

Hmmm... I'm just a tad late with this month's Taste & Create... But, better late than never, right?

This month I was paired with Debbi of Debbi Does Dinner... Many of her recipes are aimed at being low-calorie - with a few naughty treats thrown in! :)

After much thought, I settled on Debbi's recipe for Ginger Cookies... and, after a little tinkering of my own - this is what I came out with:

Ginger Cake Cookies
Now, I named these ginger cake cookies because I substituted Debbi's 3/4 cup of vegetable oil for 150g of melted butter - this resulted in a cake-ish textured cookie - if you'd prefer more of a ginger snap go ahead and use the original oil.

The porous hardness of these cookies makes
them great for dunking!
Further alterations I made were to halve the amount of sugar called for - and to use brown, rather than white sugar. It'd be interesting, I think to experiment with relying only on the treacle/molasses for sweetness in these cookies... Another change was to substitute Debbi's molasses for treacle - because I didn't have any... To make these more student store-cupboard friendly, you could probably further substitute the treacle for the more common golden syrup...? Maybe. My final alteration was to the spicage used... Debbi recommends 1 tsp of ground ginger and 1 tsp of ground cinnamon within the cookie... I put 2 tsps of ground ginger into the cookie and used the cinnamon to spice the sugar the cookies were sprinkled with/rolled in before baking. But spice is such a personal thing - I encourage you to do with it what best suits your tastes! Oh! And I also chucked in a cup of wholemeal flour and one white instead of two white...

Overall - these were tasty little morsels they remind me somewhat of my favourite "Honey Biscuits" which I must post some time... Even if I don't make them again (my love of ginger has yet to completely mature...) I'm sure my Mummy, who was quite taken with them, will...

Below is my tinkered with recipe - for the original see Debbi's site!
Set the over to 180 degrees C

Sift together:
1 cup white flour
1 cup wholemeal flour
2 tsp ginger
2 tsp baking soda

Whisk together:
150g butter, melted (for cakey cookies) OR 3/4 cup vegetable oil plus 1/2 tsp salt (for crispy cookies)
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup treacle
1 egg

Mix wet ingredients into dry to make a soft dough... Roll balls through 1 Tbsp of sugar spiced with 1/2 - 1 tsp cinnamon. Place on baking sheets (with plenty of space if making crispy cookies!) and bake for 10-12 minutes...

I made 50 cookies out of this recipe! Or, at least, I would have if I hadn't eaten so much batter... it's really yummy!

2 comments: