James Morton’s
Crisp and Quick Gingerbread
This may well be my favourite biscuit. The
key is weighing everything for accuracy
and a big quantity of ground ginger for a
good kick. Makes enough for lots of
biscuits, or 1 small gingerbread house.
Time spent in the kitchen: about 10–15
minutes. Time taken altogether: about
20–25 minutes
Ingredients
250g unsalted butter
200g muscovado sugar (or any
dark sugar)
200g golden syrup
600g plain flour
10g bicarbonate of soda
20g ground ginger
Instructions
1. Pre-heat your oven to 200°C/gas 6 (fan 180°C/gas 4), and grease a large
baking sheet or two, depending on how thin you make your gingerbread.
2. Start by weighing your ingredients. In a pan, weigh the butter, sugar
and syrup. In a large bowl, weigh the flour, bicarb and ginger, mixing
together.
3. Place the pan on a medium heat, mixing slowly all the time, until the
butter and sugar have dissolved and it’s all mixed in nicely.
4. Pour this (careful: hot) mix on to your dry mix and very quickly mix together until it comes
together into a hot dough.
5. Quickly, place the dough onto a piece of non-stick baking paper on your work surface, and
roll out to the desired thickness. For gingerbread houses, you want it to be a good half a centimetre thick, but much thinner for tree decorations or wee biscuits to give as gifts. Cut into
desired shapes on the greaseproof paper, remove the excess and slide the paper on to your
baking tray. You can re-roll the excess, but it won’t be quite as good.
6. Bake for 10–12 minutes or until just darkening at the edges. Because you are baking on a flat
sheet, oven temperature variation is really highlighted. Some pieces might be baked before
others, so there’s nothing wrong with taking some biscuits out and leaving others in. Leave
to cool before eating, as they are soft straight from the oven but quickly crisp up.
Recipe kindly donated by James Morton from his book Brilliant
Bread, published by Ebury Press, £20.
Photography by Andy Sewell ©