The Recipe Room

In today’s world, it can be hard to find the time to bake biscuits at home,  but I am convinced that home-made is still the best!  In the end it’s almost as cheap as buying them, and  there is really nothing that compares to a freshly-baked biscuit still hot from the oven.

A perennial favourite around my house, these Molasses and Spice Biscuits are almost sinfully delicious!  The cinnamon, cloves and ginger add an exotic nuance to the recipe that always makes me think of spice caravans winding their way across some Eastern desert.  Just one bite brings images of camels and colourful piles of spices and fabrics to mind.

As with most biscuit recipes, this one is fairly quick and easy to prepare.  The trick is to leave the uncooked dough in the refrigerator as long as possible, overnight if you can.  This helps to keep them from spreading out too much while baking and merging together into one giant mess on the baking sheet.

When they’re ready, serve with a glass of milk or a cup of tea for dipping.

Ingredients:

• 115g (1/2 cup) butter, softened
• 60ml (1/4 cup) vegetable oil
• 300g (1 1/2 cups) granulated white sugar
• 170g (1/2 cup) unsulphured molasses
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 510g (4 cups) white flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 1/4 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp ground cloves
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 32g granulated sugar for coating the cookies (1/4 cup).

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 175º C.
2. Cream the butter, vegetable oil and sugar in a large bowl.
3. Add the molasses and eggs and beat until thoroughly combined.
4. Set aside.
5. In another bowl, mix the flour, salt, baking soda, cloves, ginger and cinnamon.
6. Gradually stir the flour mixture into the butter and sugar bowl.
7. Keep stirring until the mixture is well blended and smooth.
8. Chill the dough for at least an hour.
9. Roll pieces of dough into 3 cm balls.
10. Coat the balls with the granulated sugar by rolling them around on a plate with the sugar.
11. Place the balls about 6 cm apart on a baking sheet.
12. Bake in the preheated oven for 14 minutes.  The biscuits will flatten as they bake.
13. Remove the biscuits from the oven and cool on wire racks.

Prep Time: 15 minutes + 30 minutes chilling

Cooking Time: 14 minutes

Serves: 6 (about 40 cookies)

Difficulty: Easy

Note: For a more chocolaty option, try these chocolate chunk and raspberry cookies.

Tags: baking soda, butter, cinnamon, cloves, eggs, ginger, molasses, molasses and spice biscuits, sugar, vegetable oil, white flour

This entry was posted on Tuesday, 5 June, 2012 at 1:50 pm by Sarah White and is filed under Desserts, Less than 1 hour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed RSS 2.0. You can leave a comment, or make a trackback from your own blog.