Recipe: Gluten-Free Stem Ginger Biscuits

I had the loveliest Saturday this weekend. Usually, my weekends are chock-a-block with plans but this Saturday, the mister was out on a course all day and my diary was free. I decided to spend the day just pottering at home - giving the place a good spring clean (haven't the blue skies this week made you want to throw open the windows and give everything an airing?!), cooking a delicious dinner and doing a spot of baking.

I love to bake but I don't get to do it as often as I'd like to...although that's probably a good thing because home-baked treats never last too long in our house! As we're off the chocolate at the moment, I decided to bake a batch of stem ginger biscuits, which always go down well. (I use a recipe found in a book called 'the gluten-free baker' which I wholeheartedly recommend for coeliacs with a sweet tooth, like myself.)

You'll need the following:

Apparently the sun had gone in when I
started baking...

♥ 160g gluten free self-raising flour
♥ 1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
♥ 180g ground almonds
♥ 180g granulated sugar
♥ 2 teaspoons ground ginger
♥ zest of 2 limes
♥ 125g butter
♥ 6 pieces of stem ginger (chop them quite finely) - use the stem ginger in syrup because you'll also need 3 tablespoons of the syrup from the jar

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees (/gas mark 4).

Combine all the 'dry' ingredients in a mixing bowl (flour, bicarbonate of soda, ground almonds, sugar, ground ginger and lime zest) and stir together well.

Yum! They're like sweets!

Chop the stem ginger pieces as finely as you like - without nibbling pieces as you go along, if you can.

Melt the butter with the ginger syrup over a low heat and let this cool for a short while, before adding it to the mixing bowl with the chopped ginger. Mix it all together - you might find that some of the mixture remains quite dry but don't worry about this.

Line a baking tray with baking parchment and take about a tablespoon of the mixture at a time. I usually roll each spoonful almost into a ball because sometimes the mixture needs a little 'encouragement' to stay together and the mixture does spread out during the baking process.

Less than 20 - definitely a post-cuppa shot.

The mixture should make about 20 biscuits, so you may need to bake in batches depending on the size of your tray...and oven. Bake in the oven for about 15 minutes until the biscuits are a gorgeous golden brown in colour. They can still be a little soft and crumbly when you take them out of the oven so it's best to let them cool on the tray for a few minutes before moving them on to a wire rack to cool...if you're able to let them last that long.

Then put the kettle on, make a big pot of tea and enjoy. Bliss!

Pancake Day!

It's Shrove Tuesday, which means...pancakes this evening! I know I can have pancakes all year round but there's something special about this one day of the year, rushing home from work knowing that dinner will be followed by a tasty sweet treat! 

There are heaps of fancy recipes around but my favourite type of pancake is the traditional delicate thin kind. They're so easy to make and we usually follow this recipe, taken from the BBC Good Food website.

To make about 12 pancakes, you will need the following ingredients:

• 100g plain flour
• 2 large eggs
• 300ml milk
• 1 tbsp vegetable oil

Combine the flour, eggs and milk in a large bowl and whisk to a smooth batter. Leave in the fridge to cool for at least 30 minutes.

source

Heat some oil in a large frying pan and, when the pan is hot, coat the pan with some of the mixture and cook until golden. The first one always tends to go appallingly but still somehow taste delicious...

Keep them warm in the oven as you go along, otherwise someone's bound to come along and work their way through the pile sitting on the plate!

I like my pancakes with a squeeze of lemon and some sugar, but feel free to go crazy and add some jam or even *gasp* nutella!

Happy Pancake Day all :)