Stranger Foods

Grasmere-style gingerbread

Serves 9 | Prep 30 mins | Cook 30 mins

Source: www.cooksinstinct.com

Ingredients

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Imperial

x0.5

200 g plain flour
50 g oats, coarsely ground
2-3 tbsp ground ginger
60 g caster sugar
60 g light brown sugar
½ tsp fine salt
150 g unsalted butter, melted
1 tbsp golden syrup or honey
1 tbsp water

Instructions

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First, let’s butter and line a square, 9x9-inch baking tin with baking paper. Preheat your oven to 180°C.
First up, dry ingredients. Into a mixing bowl, add the 200 g flour, 50 g ground oats, ½ tsp salt, 60 g caster sugar and 60 g light brown sugar. You can grind regular porridge oats in a small food processor until coarse, though you could grind them even finer if preferred.
Next, the spice. Ground ginger is all we need, and lots of it (you could always add less). Add 3 tablespoons of ground ginger into the dry ingredients and mix until well combined with no lumps of sugar remaining. Now let’s take care of the wet ingredients.
Now for the wet ingredients. We’re adding 150 g melted butter followed by 1 tablespoon of water and 1 tablespoon of golden syrup/honey. Add them straight into the dry ingredients and mix until you form a slick, tacky biscuit dough. The small addition of water sounds odd, but it promotes extra structure in the gingerbread and, along with the syrup, helps form the slightly chewy interior which Grasmere gingerbread is famed for. Now we’re ready to shape it.
We’re going to place the dough into the lined tin in small pieces, to ensure an even distribution around the tin. Press the dough into the tin so it’s about 1 cm thick. If you want it perfectly smooth, use the bottom of a flat cup to skim the surface smooth. Once you have an even slab, use a blunt knife or a scraper to score the dough into 9x square slabs, or into smaller fingers. Now we need to let the dough rest for in the tin before baking, which I’ve found makes a notable difference to the end result.
After the rest, place the gingerbread dough into the oven on a middle shelf, and bake at 180°C for , until golden brown across the surface. The gingerbreads will feel slightly soft and spongy when they’re finished, but will firm up as they cool. I recommend giving them a light press with some kitchen paper to compact them while they’re still soft, which helps promote the chewy centre. Be sure to score them again, then let them cool for to fully set to the right texture before eating.
Once cool, remove the gingerbread from its tin and you can enjoy it straight away. These will keep in an airtight tin for a few days, and as with many spiced biscuits, I think they taste even better the day after. Enjoy!

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