Ginger biscuits

Up earlier today as i need to bake some ginger biscuits for the horticultural show ready to submit for 8 am. These are being entered into a competition but i don't expect any wins as the ladies round here are all hardcore bakers that can whip up a cake batter before you can say icing.

Ingredients 

225g self raising flour
1tsp bicarbonate of soda
4tsp heaped ground ginger
1tsp cinnamon
125g butter
100g light brown muscovado sugar
100g golden syrup
100g stem ginger cut up into fine cubes

Method

• Pre heat the oven to 180c
• Place the flour, bicarbonate of soda, ginger, cinnamon, sugar, butter and rub to make a crumbly mixture
• Add the syrup and cut ginger and bring together to make a dough 
• I measured out 40g per biscuit rolled to a ball and slightly flatten and then chilled in the fridge over night (you could chill for 30 mins, i was just up early the next morning to bake them)
• Cook for 13-15 till they are golden brown 
• Place on a cooling rack for 10 mins where they will harden up but stay nice and chewy in the middle 

Hey guess what look i came 3rd not bad for my first try, apparently touch more ginger was to the judges tastes so if you like really gingery ginger nuts maybe add 5-6 tps of ground ginger !! now that is very gingery.

Bitter orange and ginger gammon

We have a tradition in our house for starting to prepare and eat the Gammon a few days before Christmas.

With so much meat suddenly available on Christmas day and not wanting to waste food and feel overstuffed  by boxing day we start early and enjoy a bit of tasty Gammon.  Ali is always in charge of meat over Christmas and he choose a monster gammon.

After soaking it for 24 hours to get rid of some of the salt it took 5 hours to roast it was so huge, the house smelt wonderful and we were salivating while it cooked.

This year we decided to do a bitter orange and ginger glaze as we were getting bored of honey and mustard and maple and mustard.

Here are the ingredients
2 tbsp of Chinese five spice
zest of 3 clementines (or oranges)
6 bits of fresh Ginger (you can use stem ginger too)
1 pot of bitter orange marmalade
1 pot of whole grain mustard

Ali above is blitzing all the ingredients together apart from the whole grain which he put in at the end and briefly blitzed so not to break up the grains to much.

  On the last 30 mins of cooking we put the glaze over the meat and a 150ml of boiling water in the base of the pan and added slices of clementines over the outside and secured with cocktail sticks while it was cooking.  Ali made me laugh as he said with the clementine decoration it looked really 70's. Once cooked the cocktail sticks can be removed and the orange should stay behind on the meat.  If the feasting hadn't started before in our house it certainly has now.