Travels With My Cat

Feeling well and truly in the festive mood, and having been inspired by our friend @ginger_ned’s great piece in the Christmas issue of Pets’ Mews, a couple of aunts, and a recent trip to a certain Scandi DIY store, Tipsy decided to try her paw at a bit of gingery baking and got me to search out a recipe for traditional Pepparkakor (ginger snaps).

Some included eggs, some didn’t, so in the end, we came up with a bit of a hodgy-podgy mix and took elements from Delia, Mary Berry and swedishfood.com, and also added and amended (by this read, improvised because we didn’t have all the ingredients) and came up with our own recipe, which was quite a success, I’m happy to report.

This is what you need:

Equipment

• A pestle and mortar (if you are feeling fancy – otherwise just use ground spices, which is what we usually do, but our Aunt Els Pet gave us a lovely one as a present, so we wanted to try it, and our cousin Gellika Pet had made a rather spectacular gingerbread house once, so we know they are good bakers).
• A saucepan
• A bowl and some cling film
• A baking tin, lined with baking paper
• Some lovely Christmassy cutters (if you’re baking at Christmas time, or normal nice ones, if you’re not).
• Pre-heated oven to GM 6 / 200 degrees C

Ingredients

Part 1: The yummy stuff

• 150g butter
• 250g demerara sugar (we used the darker one)
• 1 tbsp of golden syrup (you can add more and treacle and Sirap – Swedish syrup – but we didn’t want the biccies to be too sweet, and we didn’t have any sirap)

Part 2: The spices that smell divine

• 1/2 tbsp ground cardamon
• 2 tbsp ground ginger (but to be honest, I’d actually add even more, because we’d have liked a more gingery taste.  Aunty Gargee Pet also said it would be better to add fresh ginger, which makes sense.  We’ll try that next time). 
• 1 tbsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground cloves

Part 3: The baking stuff

• 1/2 tbsp sodium bicarbonate
• 100 mls water
• 450g plain flour (we used strong, and we should have sifted it, otherwise you get lumps and pockets of flour)

Instucktions

(NB: That’s how cats say, ‘instructions’, I’m not sure why, but it’s true). 

1. On a low flame, heat everything from part 1 (butter, sugar and syrup), yummy – but don’t be tempted to lick the spoon yet, because it’ll be very, very, very hot, and be careful not to get any on your fur – we all remember what happened to Paddington Bear when he tried to make toffee.
2. Next, take the pan off the fire, and stir in the spices gently (mmmmm).
3. Now, add the bicarb and water and it becomes all bubbly.
4. Finally fold in the flour a bit at a time.
5. Bring the mixture together as a dough, transfer to a bowl. 
6. Once cool, cover with cling film and leave in the fridge overnight.  Some of the recipes said to leave it for an hour, some suggested a week, but a night seemed fine to us.

1. When you’re ready to bake, pre-heat the oven and take a bit of the dough out.  It’ll be quite cold and hard to work, so we took it out in lumps, worked it with our hands a bit (it’s a fairly robust dough, so can take a bit of battering and work), then roll out to the width of about a pound coin.
2. Cut out the biscuits with your cutters.  We ended up making around 50 with the dough we had – great for munching and for presents.
3. Bake on the baking paper on a tray for anywhere between 6 to 18 minutes.  Now, you may be wondering why there’s such a huge range here.  Our oven always seems a bit leisurely in its baking style, so we generally add another few minutes to the bake.  But, at around 12 minutes, the biscuits still seemed underdone, soft and pale,so we left them there till 18 minutes. 
4. Once we’d taken them out, they hardened up and changed to the darker colour we’d been expecting.  They tasted delicious and not at all burnt (mostly), but they were very hard – so watch those teeth, and snap them before eating, or dunk them in a nice cuppa.  They may have been less snappy if we’d taken them out earlier – so experiment and see what works best for you and your oven. 

You can then ice them, or not, and give away to family and friends and / or eat them all (though we don’t recommend doing that in one go, as you might get a tummy ache).  I’ve also heard from a reliable source, that Father Christmas is rather partial to a ginger biccie, so consider leaving him a few on the 24th.