How could anyone resist these really, when it comes right down to it??? I love snickerdoodles. I love gingersnaps/crinkles.
The two together in one moreish biscuit/cookie? I'm in! All in! I can't think of anyone who wouldn't be all in! If they aren't, they're not human. Just my thoughts on that matter!
Snickerdoodles are a vanilla cinnamon sugar type of cookie. The dough is rolled into balls and they are rolled in a mix of cinnamon sugar prior to baking. You can find my recipe for those here.
Gingersnaps/Crinkles are a ginger cookie, made with molasses and warm baking spices. They are rolled into balls and rolled in a mix of plain sugar prior to baking. I can't believe I have never shared my recipe for those with you!
Once you have done that you mix some molasses and baking spices into half of the dough. You will also need to add a bit more flour so that the dough is not too sticky or loose. Because molasses is a liquid ingredient this is necessary.
If you are here in the UK, it can be very difficult to get molasses. I have always found that a suitable substitute is to mix together half golden syrup and half dark treacle. This works well.
Dark treacle on its own has far too strong a flavour. Funny story. I know how you like them. Or at least I hope that you do! (Don't burst my bubble!)
When I first moved here to Chester from Canada back in the year 2000, I was somewhat of an oddity. People were very curious about Canada, the wild West, the colonies. My accent was unusual as were my ways.
I had not lived here long when I was asked by the Relief Society of my church Ward would I do a presentation for the ladies on all things Canadian. It would be a great way for me to get to know them and them to get to know me!
I was very much still finding my way around ingredients here in the UK. I decided to make my Canadian MIL's gingersnaps for them. You didn't get much more Canadian than that! Or Eastern Canadian for that matter.
They were always deliciously crisp and moreish. I spent all day making them, and I used what is called dark treacle over here in the UK. I thought it was the same thing as molasses. I couldn't have been more wrong!
I dutifully mixed everything up and baked them, only to discover they were inedible. Dark Treacle is so strong in flavour and just like eating smoke to my tastebuds. Thank goodness I had also made Nanaimo bars and a few other bits which helped to soften the blow of inedible cookies!
And because I hadn't actually had time to try one myself during the day, I hadn't tasted them before I served them. I was just taking for granted that they were going to be as delicious as they had always been. 😂😂
There was a young sister in our Ward who was a bit simple minded and the look of disgust on her face when she bit into one was priceless. You know people like that are always very honest in their delivery of things and opinions.
"These are awful!" She said. "I don't like them!" Lesson learnt! And then of course I despaired. How was I ever going to live without Molasses!
I come from a place where there is a Molasses jug on every dinner table. We have it for breakfast, lunch and supper and everything in-between! It's enjoyed on our pancakes, our biscuits, our breads and in many of our foods!
Thank goodness I was able to find some (however over inflated price wise) at an American supply shop eventually. I also discovered that if you mixed treacle and golden syrup you came up with a very edible substitute!
Anyways, back to the Gingerdoodles. The only fiddly part about making these is twisting the two doughs together. Just do the best you can, roll them into balls and then drop the balls into the sugar.
Onto the baking sheets, and Bob's your Uncle! Voila. Delicious cookies that are a beautiful mix of two fabulous flavours!
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 cups (250g) sugar
- 1 cup (120g) butter, softened
- 2 large free range eggs
- 2 3/4 cup (385g) all purpose flour
- 2 tsp cream of tartar
- 1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 3 TBS mild molasses (can use half golden syrup and half dark treacle in the UK)
- 1/4 cup (35g) all purpose flour
- 1/2 tsp ground ginger
- 1/2 tsp ground cloves
- 1/3 cup (65g) of granulated sugar
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 200*C/400*F/ gas mark 6. Line several baking sheets with baking parchment.
- Combine all of the ingredients for the cinnamon dough in a bowl. Beat at low speed with an electric mixer, scraping the bowl frequently, until everything is well mixed.
- Divide the dough, placing half into another bowl. To that half, beat in the molasses, flour and spices for the ginger dough, until well combined.
- Put the granulatd sugar into a bowl.
- Twist 3/4 inch pieces of each of the doughs together, and roll into a ball. Roll into the sugar and then place spaced 3 inches apart on the baking sheets.
- Bake in the preheated oven for 8 to 10 minutes.
- Let cool on the baking sheet for five minutes before scooping off to a wire rack to cool. Repeat until all the dough is used up. Any leftover of any one dough can be shaped and baked as above. Store in an airtight container.
I'm a cookie dunker. Are you? I love to enjoy my cookies with a glass of cold milk more than I do with any other beverage. And I love do dunk them. Must be the child in me!
This content (written and photography) is the sole property of The English Kitchen. Any reposting or misuse is not permitted. If you are reading this elsewhere, please know that it is stolen content and you may report it to me at: mariealicejoan at aol dot com Thanks so much for visiting. Do come again!
One of the recipes in the recipe cards was for these Cinnamon Doughnut Puffs. Delicious buttery muffins, rolled in melted butter and cinnamon sugar after baking.
The flavour of them is very similar to the favour of a cake doughnut. Cake Doughnuts are my favourite kind of doughnuts!
She was making doughnuts right up into her old age. Mom said however that she would always burn her fingertips in the fat because she had lost the feeling in them by that time.
The last time we saw her she was suffering from Dementia. By that stage she was seeing things that were not there and did not know who most people were. My sister and I spent most of that visit in the field by the house feeding the old white horse that was kept there carrots and apples.
My sister was horse crazy. She used to say she was going to marry one when she grew up. She came close. Her first husband was a jack you know what, LOL Sorry, I could not resist and truth be told she would agree with me!
Anyways, Doughnut Muffins. I adore Doughnut Muffins. You get all of the wonderful flavour of a cake doughnut without any of the faff of frying!
My mother used to buy a bag of them every now and then for us as a real treat. She would warm them up in the oven in a paper bag. Nothing on earth tasted better than those doughnuts. She would give them to us as a dessert with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side. Heaven.
These have a beautiful texture. I love the flavour of the nutmeg in them. I suppose that is also what I love about cake doughnuts! I adore nutmeg!
I have also added some vanilla. Mostly because I am trying to use it up before I move, but also because I like vanilla and it goes really well with nutmeg.
If I had to choose between a cake doughnut and a yeast doughnut, I will choose a cake doughnut every time. There is something about their texture that I love more than anything in the world.
When you are making these, do not overmix the batter. Its okay to have a lumpy batter when it comes to muffins. In fact it is most desirable. Overmixing will result in a tough muffin and they won't raise as high!
I think of all the cake type doughnuts, sour cream are my favourite kind, followed closely by sour cream chocolate (doughnuts!). I can't wait to go to Tim Hortons and enjoy a couple of Tim Bits!
That's what they call the doughnut holes back home. Tim Bits. Nothing of the dougnut is wasted and you can buy the Tim Bits by the box, small, medium and large. And, if you take your kids there after socker practice, they will give them a free Tim Bit, which to a child is a very big deal!
Cinnamon Doughnut Puffs
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup (120ml) milk
- 1/3 cup (80g) butter, melted
- 1 large free range egg, beaten
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 2/3 cup (225g) all purpose (plain) flour
- 3/4 cup (150g) sugar
- 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
- 1/3 cup (80g) butter, melted
- 1/2 cup (100g) granulated sugar
- 1 tsp ground cinnamon
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 190*C/375*F/ gas mark 5. Butter a 12 cup muffin tin really well with butter or spray with cooking spray. Set aside.
- Combine the milk, egg, vanilla, and melted butter in a measuring cup.
- Whisk the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and nutmeg together in a bowl. Make a well in the centre and add the wet ingredients all at once. Stir together just to combine. Divide between the greased muffin cups.
- Bake in the preheated oven for 15 to 20 minutes. They should be well risen and a toothpick inserted in the centre should come out clean. Tip out of the pan onto a wire rack and allow to cool for several minutes.
- Put the melted butter in one bowl and mix the sugar and cinnamon together in another bowl. Roll the warm muffins in the butter and then roll them in the cinnamon sugar to coat.
- Serve warm, split and spread with butter. Delicious!
There are a great many versions of this delicious muffin out there. This one is excellent and makes for the perfect weekend breakfast with your morning cuppa!
This content (written and photography) is the sole property of The English Kitchen. Any reposting or misuse is not permitted. If you are reading this elsewhere, please know that it is stolen content and you may report it to me at: mariealicejoan at aol dot com Thanks so much for visiting. Do come again!
There is something really comforting about a good banana bread. I have baked many through the years and have my favourites. Family Favourite Banana Bread and Rich Banana Bread are two of my absolute favourites.
The family favourite recipe is one I baked for my family for many years. It is moist and delicious. The rich banana bread recipe is the banana bread I used to bake for the Mr when I worked at the manor down south. He had to have a loaf of it baked for him every week! It is also moist and delicious.
Big Banana breads just are not practical in this house these days. I know I could freeze them but for me something is lost in the flavour when something is frozen. Maybe it is just in my head, I don't know for sure.
This recipe for Banana Chocolate Chip Bread for Two solves that problem. It makes one small Banana Bread, 5 1/2 by 3 inches in size. It is perfectly sized for the smaller family.
This loaf may be small in stature, but it is big on flavour. It lacks nothing in the least of its much larger counterpart!
It is rich, moist, and delicious. There is only a tiny bit of fat in the form of 1 TBS of unsalted butter, melted. This is great because you end up with a bread that is not oily or greasy in the least. Too many banana breads can end up this way. Blech!
It uses one small banana, about 1/4 cup of mashed banana. This means that there is plenty of banana flavour in this loaf.
The abundance of natural sugars in bananas are the secret to a moist and delicious Banana Bread. Make sure your bananas are nice and ripe before you use them in a banana bread.
Ideally they should be starting to soften. The skin should be well spotted with brown flecks of colour. The more brown flecks the better!
I have used bananas to make banana bread that most people would throw away. I am talking just about black in colour skin-wise. They make the best banana breads.
They mash beautifully and are the sweetest! Seriously! I am a person who hates chunks of banana in my banana bread.
I want a smooth texture without lumps of banana. I do like toasted nuts in it, but no banana lumps! I am funny that way.
If you use yellow not-so-ripe bananas they just won't work right. They just don't have the sweetness and flavour of their over-ripe counterparts!
They can even remain quite starchy after baking! This is a big No No! There are a lot of theories out there about how to ripen bananas.
One of the best ways it to place them into a paper bag and shut it up, leaving them in there for a few days. This is the most effective method.
It does the job best. The bag traps the ethyene gas produced by ripening fruit. This in turn helps to speed up the process from the normal time of just leaving them on the counter-top. You will find you only need a day or two!
I like toasted walnuts in my banana bread. Banana and walnuts just are perfect partners. You could also use pecans. The Mr down south liked toasted pecans over walnuts.
I like both, but prefer the walnuts. I get that from my dad. He is nuts about walnuts as well! And of course as I tell you frequently, toasting your nuts just makes them nuttier!
I guess that means I will have to cut back on my peanut butter and toast supper. Most nights that is what I have for my supper. A slice of toast spread with peanut butter.
Not a good thing in the long run I guess. Bad news for me who always has said that if I was marooned on a desert island I would want a jar of peanut butter and potatoes with me. Ho hum . . .
Banana Chocolate Chip Bread for Two
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup (70g) all purpose/plain flour
- 1/4 cup (30g) toasted and chopped walnuts
- 2 TBS good quality dark milk chocolate, grated or cut into chunks (I use Green & Black's)
- 1/4 cup (50g) sugar
- 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 1/8 tsp salt
- 1 small ripe banana, peeled and mashed really well (about 1/4 cup)
- 1 large free range egg, at room temperature
- 1 TBS unsalted butter, melted and cooled
- 1 TBS plain yogurt
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 180*C.350*F/ gas mark 4. Butter a 5 1/2 by 3 inch loaf tin and line with baking paper.
- Whisk the flour, chocolate, walnuts, sugar, soda and salt together in a medium bowl.
- In a separate bowl, whisk together the melted and cooled butter, bananas, egg, yogurt and vanilla.
- Gently fold the wet ingredients into the dry just to combine. Do not overmix. Spoon into the prepared pan, smoothing the top.
- Bake in the preheated oven for 30 to 40 minutes until the loaf is golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean.
- Let cool in the pan on a wire rack for 5 minutes before lifting out from the pan to cool completely. Leave to cool for one hour before slicing to serve.
I really hope that you will want to bake this Banana bread if you are in a small family, and if you are not, maybe you will enjoy one of the larger loaves that I have linked up to here. Also, if I was to small size another kind of quick bread, what would be your choice of smaller sized recipes you might like to see? I aim to please!
This content (written and photography) is the sole property of The English Kitchen. Any reposting or misuse is not permitted. If you are reading this elsewhere, please know that it is stolen content and you may report it to me at: mariealicejoan at aol dot com Thanks so much for visiting. Do come again!
One of my favourite things here in the UK has to be Mary Berry. I had never heard of her prior to moving over here. I think the only British chef I knew prior to moving here was Paul Rankin. I used to watch a show called Ready Steady Cook.
It had celebrity chef's on it, hosted by Ainsley Harriot ( another chef, who actually lives in Chester). The Chefs were Paul Rankin, James Martin, Anthony Worrall Thompson, Phil Vickery, Lesley Water's, Nick Nairn, and a few others. Those are the names I remember.
I had actually seen Paul Rankin on PBS tv prior to moving here where he was on an Irish cooking show and I actually got to meet him in person about 12 or 13 years ago when I was on another cooking show here in the UK.
I had always thought him to be tall, but he's not. Cute accent though and he thought my soup was gorgeous.
Mary Berry was not on that show. I first became acquainted with her when I bought her cake baking book, and of course she was in the BBC Good Food magazine quite frequently. Then of course The Great British Bake Off came along and now the whole world knows her!
I also got to meet Curtis Stone, Jean Christophe Novelli, Phil Vickery and Jamie Oliver through the years, not all at once.
I would have loved to meet Mary Berry, but instead I get to cook her recipes. I have never experienced a dud, which I can't say about some of the others!
I have been going through papers and things and found this recipe for Mary's Perfect Shortbread which I had pulled out of a magazine a while back. Easy Cook, but it doesn't say which year.
I thought this might be the only chance I have to bake them. I won't be able to bring anything with me for the most part when I move back to Canada, so I thought to myself better now than never!
Plus it is a horrible, rainy, wet and miserable day out there. I thought losing myself in a bit of shortbread was not entirely a bad way to spend part of the day!
Shortbread has to be one of the easiest biscuits/cookies to bake, but you can also get it very wrong. You need to handle the dough gently or you will make it tough.
You also have to make sure your hands are cool so that you don't melt the fat in the dough.
This means you need to work quickly when you are rubbing the butter into the flour. I always use cold butter, cutting it into bits and dropping it into the flour to rub it in.
You could also use a pastry blender or a food processor I suppose, but your fingers work really well. Just work quickly.
Pricking it all over with a fork once you have it rolled out and docked/fluted will ensure that any air caught in the pastry/dough will come out. This means that you won't end up with air bubbles in the shortbreads.
Also chilling it in the refrigerator prior to baking also helps to ensure a crisp finish. You don't need to chill it for long. Ten minutes will do fine.
You also want to score it with a sharp knife prior to baking. This recipe makes 8 wedges. What I do is to score it into quarters and the score each quarter in half. Works a charm.
Do not cut them all the way through or separate them. I fluted the edge all the way around with my finger tips and also marked it the tines of a fork. I think it came out quite pretty.
Some of you will want to know what castor sugar is. Castor sugar is a kind of granulated sugar which is used for baking here in the UK. I think it is very similar to fruit sugar in North America.
Our granulated sugar here is much coarser than North American sugar. Castor sugar is much finer. The reason that it is used for baking is because it melds into doughs and batters much faster.
You will find often here in the UK it is just stirred into batters and doughs because it melts so easily. It gives a smooth finish whereas regular granulated sugar might give a grainy finish, which is not very desirable.
You can easily make your own castor sugar by running you granulated sugar through a food processor to grind it down a bit, or in a spice grinder. What you don't want is to grind it to a powder!
Once the shortbreads come out of the oven you will need to score them again, while they are still warm. This time cut the all the way through to the bottom with a sharp knife. That way they won't break unevenly or crumble apart when it comes time to serve them.
Again, the perfect finish. Its little things like this. Handy little tips that make all the difference in the world. Especially when it comes to presentation!
So there you have it Mary's Perfect Shortbreads. You can't go wrong!! (Christmas is coming!! Perfect for tea parties also!)
Mary's Perfect Shortbread
Ingredients
- 1 cup less 2 TBS (125g) plain flour
- 6 1/2 TBS (60g) cornflour (cornstarch)
- 1/2 cup plus 2 tsp (125g) butter
- 5 TBS (60g) castor sugar, plus more for sprinkling (fine granulated sugar)
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 160*C/325*F/ gas mark 3.
- Sift the cornflour and flour into a bowl. Rub the butter into the mixture with your fingertips until it resembles fine crumbs. Stir in the sugar. Knead gently until it forms a smooth dough. Shape into a round flat disk.
- Place onto a sheet of baking parchment. Using a rolling pin, roll it out to a disc which is 7 inches in diameter. (18 cm) Gently lift the baking parchment onto a baking sheet. Using your fingers crimp around the edges and prick all over with a fork. Using a sharp knife, score it lightly with a sharp knife into 8 even wedges.
- Chill until firm.
- Bake in the oven for 35 minutes until the shortbread is a pale golden colour. Mark the wedges again and dust lightly with more caster sugar.
- Leave to cool on the baking tray for five minutes, then carefully lift off to cool completely on a wire rack.
- Cut into wedges to serve.
notes:
This recipe was adapted from one found in Mary Berry's Complete Cookbook. You cannot beat Mary Berry for sound, good, fail-proof recipes! These shortbreads are excellent!
This content (written and photography) is the sole property of The English Kitchen. Any reposting or misuse is not permitted. If you are reading this elsewhere, please know that it is stolen content and you may report it to me at: mariealicejoan at aol dot com Thanks so much for visiting. Do come again!
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