Time for a christening!

I got a new oven installed on Monday, and it's a shiny thing of much shininess. Naturally, it needs to be christened! I stumbled across this recipe the other day, and it really caught my eye, so I thought I'd try doing a version of it.

Soft Ginger Treacle Biscuits
Ingredients

• 175g Butter
• 150g Soft dark brown sugar
• 2 Eggs
• 125g Black treacle
• 2tsp Vanilla extract
• 375g Plain flour
• 3tsp Baking powder
• 4tsp Ground ginger
• 1tsp Ground cloves
• 1tsp Ground nutmeg
• Pinch of salt
• Caster sugar for coating

Method

1. Cream the butter and sugar together.
2. Beat in the eggs, then stir in the treacle and vanilla.
3. Stir in the flour, baking powder, spices and salt to form a mixture/soft dough.
4. Roll mixture into 2-3cm diameter balls and roll in caster sugar.
5. Bake at 180C for 10 minutes, then cool on a wire rack.

Here's my shiny new oven. Check out how shiny it is!

Here's the "dough" ready to be shaped.

This is only the first batch of biscuits, ready for the oven. It's about half the overall yield.

Oooooooh!

Aren't they pretty?

They look gorgeous, no?

So what were they like? Pretty good really. Straight from the oven, while they were still warm, they were beautifully soft. When they cool, they develop a lovely little crunch around the edges, with a soft centre - although the centre did start to feel a little drier when cold. The treacle lent them a lovely taste, which went nicely with the ginger and other spices. Unfortunately, this batch ended up over-salted (I think I may have accidentally used salted butter, which I don't usually buy), which made them taste a little strange, but not unpleasantly so. Fiona certainly seemed to like them though! I'll have to bring them into the lab tomorrow and see what the other post-docs think...