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Soft Ginger Nuts
Make the dough as for brandy snaps, and add to it 8 ounces more flour. Roll it out to a thick sheet and cut out with a small cutter.
Two lines that assume you already have the brandy snap recipe open in front of you. Everything that matters here is what the extra flour does to that dough and how you handle it once stiffened.
- It is a dependent recipeNothing here works without the brandy snap formula from the same book — typically molasses or golden syrup, butter, sugar, ground ginger and flour, warmed together. Find that recipe first; this entry only tells you how to convert it.
- What the 8 ounces of flour doesBrandy snap batter is deliberately slack so it spreads into lace and can be rolled while hot. Adding half a pound of flour turns it into a stiff, rollable cookie dough that holds a cut edge instead of running. Add it while the mixture is still warm and pliable; once cold, a molasses dough of this stiffness fights the spoon.
- "A thick sheet"Read this as about 1/2 inch. Ginger nuts are meant to dome and stay soft in the middle; rolled thin they bake into hard snaps, which defeats the name.
- Cutter sizeThe recipe gives no size. Something in the region of 1 1/2 to 2 inches suits a dough rolled this thick; much larger rounds will need longer in the oven if the centres are to set.
- OvenNo temperature or time is given. Molasses doughs scorch easily, so a moderate oven — around 350F — and 10 to 12 minutes is a reasonable starting point. Pull them when the tops have just cracked and the centres still give; they firm as they cool.
- Keeping them softThe softness comes from the molasses holding moisture, not from underbaking. Store them in a closed tin; an apple wedge or slice of bread in the tin will keep them yielding for several days.
- YieldUnstated, and not calculable without knowing the size of the brandy snap batch being amended.
"Ginger nut" is the older British name for a small, hard-baked ginger biscuit — nut in the sense of a small round lump, the usage generally thought to lie behind doughnut as well. Molasses is hygroscopic, which is why a molasses-heavy ginger biscuit stays chewy rather than drying to a snap. That this recipe is written as an amendment to another one tells you what kind of book this is: a shop with brandy snap dough already on the bench could produce a second line by working in more flour rather than starting a fresh batch. Ginger and molasses were among the cheapest flavourings a bakery had, and ginger cakes and nuts were accordingly inexpensive counter goods.