Stem Gingernuts

Our first weekend of baking didn’t go entirely to plan because we didn’t even bother following the plan, hence this post going up a full 24 hours later than planned.

Friday, Kalin went shopping with her mom in the morning and picked up some household stuff we needed during which she intended to buy a kitchen scale. Which is apparently a known tool in the baking world but I had never used one before so I didn’t really know why we needed one, but, as Kalin and our friend Rhi not-so-gently informed me, we need one because UK recipes are measured more commonly in weight rather than millilitres or cups or what have you, and converting back and forth between the two isn’t exact. So a kitchen scale we needed. But then Kalin forgot to buy a kitchen scale and her mom forgot to bring our new KitchenAid mixer so that didn’t go to plan. But that’s fine, we still had to go grocery shopping (for ourselves and the recipe) and could probably pick up a scale along the way, right? No. Because we forgot again. So Saturday we were planning to go to the winter farmer’s market at Nat Bailey, which is wonderful by the way, and on the way home stop and pick up a scale and meet Kalin’s Mom to get the mixer. Which we did, and then the day turned into hanging out with friends on South Granville until late afternoon, so by the time we got home we were both tired and hungry and just blah so no baking took place. Instead we re-watched a few episodes of the first series of the Great British Bake Off, and I discovered that BBC’s new series the Musketeers is now on Netflix [!!!] so that’s what we did that night. And Sunday – between baking, of course.

We planned on waking up early Sunday morning to get ahead and hopefully complete our gingernuts by early afternoon because today was officially the end of our winter holidays and we had to return to work and school and needed to prepare. But! This didn’t go entirely to plan either because we both slept through our alarms. We had not bothered reading the actual recipe until we started getting ready to bake resulting in our not realizing that stem ginger not being just a stem of ginger. No, it is ginger coated in syrup, like candied ginger but a bit different. Which we did not have, nor did we have caster sugar or self-raising flour, because neither of those things are really a… thing in North America (so I’ve been told.). So before we even started we had to find out how we were going to deal with all that, and after some quick searches by Kalin, we found these: how to make self-raising flour via Nigella.com, how to make caster sugar via ButterSugarCream at Blogspot, and how to make stem ginger by JoBlogsJoBakes. Turning our cane sugar [the directions use granulated sugar, but we have cane sugar since Kalin is particular about some of the ingredients we will be using – worked the same] into caster sugar and our all-purpose white flour into self-raising flour took hardly any time at all, but making stem ginger took a little over an hour. I peeled and sliced our ginger into pieces, then let them simmer in a pot just covered in water until they became tender. Then we added the sugar and simmered again until the water became syrup-y et voilà! Stem ginger!

We even kept the left over syrup, and have enough to put in tea the next time one of us is sick!

Now that we got all the unexpected preparations complete, on to the actual recipe. [We only have our cell phone cameras to take picture with so please excuse the varied quality of our photos :).]

It’s actually a fairly simple recipe and didn’t even require our fabulous new mixer as we had assumed. We chopped up our newly made stem ginger and mixed up our dry ingredients, made the syrup/butter mixture for the ginger pieces and combined it all with an egg. The recipe calls for 3 pans full of walnut-sized balls of dough to make 24 cookies, but since we only have one cookie sheet, we traded them out when ever batch of gingernuts was ready. Probably because of this, our walnut sized dough bits ended up varied in size and we ended up with 46 gingernuts! Almost twice as many! You will not hear us complaining though. We put the first batch in for 20 minutes and found that was a bit too long for them to be in, as they ended up being a bit darker brown in colour and crispier. The rest of the batches were put in for approximately 15-17 minutes and let to rest while still soft and a lighter brown colour, so we ended up with softer cookies. Ah, something else to note, due to a miscalculation we used 30g of stem ginger instead of the called for 35g but with the added ground ginger in with the dry ingredients we found the end result to be very ginger-y for our tastes. A good ginger-y, but we probably would’ve go above this level, since my tummy can only take one or two of them in a sitting. And that’s that!

Time management with definitely continue to be an area to be improved upon for us, but otherwise I think our first go went really well and I’m looking forward to making our next recipe. Once I get all my homework done, of course. Speaking of our next recipe, since this coming Friday is Kalin’s birthday she chose what we will be making. A Clotted Cream Cake! Which will be Kalin’s pseudo-birthday cake, which I’m sure she doesn’t mind at all.

**Bonus pictures of our ever enthusiastic helper, Miso. And again when she’s not feeling so helpful, she sits on her chair just outside the kitchen and observes.**

EDIT {01/06}: It was kindly brought to our attention that we never included pictures of the final product! How silly of us!