busy mum's ginger and all spice biscuits

This a recipe straight from the store cupboard.  So when your daughter says, at half past five on a mid-week afternoon, "Mum I need to take some biscuits to school tomorrow for a class party", you can channel your inner Super Mum and say, "Yes dear, lets make them right now" without batting an eyelid or dropping those other ten balls you are juggling.

Its also a great recipe for little children to make because the cookies are formed by rolling a ball, just like playing with play dough.  Fun for everybody, and yummy afterwards too.

Ingredients:
- 100g butter
- 100g golden syrup
- 100g light brown sugar
- 1 teaspoon ground ginger & 1 teaspoon of mixed spices
- 225g plain flour
- 1 teaspoon bicarbonate soda

Heat oven to 180 degrees.

Put a stove top pot on your kitchen scales and zero the weight.
Add the butter, golden syrup and brown sugar.
Put the pot on the stove and heat slowly until butter is melted, stir with wooden spoon to combine.
Sift flour, spices and bicarb into the pot and mix with a wooden spoon until all ingredients are blended and you have a play dough like consistency (see above left).

Wait for 5 minutes until dough is cool enough to handle.

Now for the fun part.  Scoop out a heaped teaspoon of dough and roll roughly into a ball.  Toddler skills are fine, the balls do not have to be perfect as the dough melts in the oven.  They should all be roughly the same size so that they take the same time to cook.

Place biscuits on a tray with a bit of space between each ball.  I like to use a silicon mat but you can use baking paper.

Bake for 8-10 minutes until cracks appear in the surface and biscuits are golden but not brown (above right).  Take biscuits out of the oven but leave them on the baking tray until they are cool and hard.  Best enjoyed dunked into tea or coffee.

Be careful about watching the biscuits, they go from brown to burned in a flash.  We didn't hear the timer and I went from Super-Mum-with-home-made-biscuits to Normal-Mum-buys-biscuits-from-store-on-way-to-school in the blink of an eye.  

Luckily we had enough for round two.  Sweet as a nut as the saying goes.