Recipe 27: Chocolate and ginger oat biscuits

As I was walking out the College this evening, a colleague passed me and commented on the empty cake tin I was carrying, asking if there were ‘cookies’ inside [she is not from British shores].  As it happens, there weren’t, but it had recently carried a carrot cake (see recipe for Week 7) for colleague Peter’s 50^th birthday. An amazing cake and one I’ll make again and again. And again.
 
Anyway, it occurred to me that I hadn't made ‘cookies’ or biscuits for some time, well, since the first recipe in this blog in fact, and so, with wifi enabled, I went in search and found these fellows on the BBC website, from the Great British Bake Off. Can you get a higher pedigree of biscuit?

Now this made 36 big biscuits in my mix – unless you eat a lot of biscuits or know people who do, maybe reduce the recipe accordingly…

Ingredients:

225g/8oz unsalted butter	4 tsp ground ginger
100g/3½oz golden syrup	2 tsp ground cinnamon
200g/7oz soft brown sugar	400g/14oz rolled oats
150g/3½oz plain flour	2 free-range eggs, beaten
2 tsp baking powder	50g/1¾oz stem ginger, chopped
1 tsp sea salt flakes	115g/4oz good quality dark chocolate

Preheat the oven to 180C. Line two to three baking trays with non-stick parchment. Melt the butter and the golden syrup in a pan over a low heat. Set aside to cool slightly.

Combine the sugar, flour, baking powder, salt and spices and mix well to combine. Stir in the rolled oats and mix thoroughly. Pour in the melted butter and syrup and stir until well combined. Then stir in the beaten eggs and the stem ginger.

Spoon in even, heaped teaspoons onto the lined baking trays, leaving room for them to spread. Bake in the oven for 8-10 minutes. Remove the biscuits from the oven and set aside to cool completely. Don’t take them out too early or they’ll be a bit gooey. Let them crisp up to a very light brown.

Melt the chocolate in a bowl suspended over a pan of barely simmering water (do not let the bottom of the bowl touch the water). Dip the biscuits in the melted chocolate and place on a cooling rack until the chocolate has set.