Thursday, May 31, 2007

Iced Spice Fingers


Today Rach was coming over for a nice early (11am) visit with Ethan so I thought I would whip up a batch up bickies for morning tea, biscuits are my craze at the moment & there will be a few more coming up soon. I don’t think starting at 7.30am on baking is a good idea as I must have been half asleep, they were nearly a disaster but somehow managed to turn out very nice indeed in the end by some miracle. Do you like the nice fluorescent shade of pink I managed to attain? Firstly after stage one I ran upstairs to do my morning exercise, bike & some sit ups (still trying to regain pre pregnancy bod) & 5 minutes in remembered that I forgot to add the egg & vanilla so ran down, took the mix out of the fridge & added them in completely the wrong order, it was so tough to stir these in that I actually broke my wooden spoon in half. After my exercise session I then realized that I forgot to preheat my oven but went ahead without waiting as I only had so much of a window while the little Miss was asleep. Next I made the icing with 2 tablespoons instead of teaspoons of flour & was worried that this would lend a floury flavour but no taste of flour at all. I guess the lesson is that even when it looks like you might have to bin the mix all can still turn out & exact measurements or following of the recipe is not really necessary even in the more unforgiving world of baking where I thought that precision was always the key!

Iced Spice Fingers

180g butter
100g brown sugar
265g (3/4 cup) golden syrup
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
450g plain flour
75g self raising flour
½ teaspoon bicarb of soda
3 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon each of ground cinnamon & mixed spice
½ teaspoon ground cloves

Icing
240g (1 ½ cups) icing sugar
2 teaspoon plain flour
1 egg white
1 tablespoon lemon juice

Preheat oven to 170c. Combine butter, sugar & golden syrup in a saucepan and stir over low heat until sugar is dissolved and butter melted. Cool for 10 minutes, then stir through egg & vanilla.

Sift dry ingredients into a large bowl, pour over golden syrup mixture & stir to combine. Turn mixture out onto a lightly floured work surface & knead until combined. Wrap in plastic wrap & refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Using your hands, roll tablespoons of the mixture into 6cm lengths. Place onto baking paper lined oven trays & press lightly to flatten. Bake for 12 minutes or until browned. Cool on a wire rack.

For the icing, sift together sugar & flour. In a bowl lightly whisk egg white until foamy, gradually stir in icing sugar mixture, then add lemon juice & mix to combine. Halve icing, add a few drops of pink colouring to half & stir to combine. Spread icing over biscuits and stand until set.

2 comments:

Cindy said...

Glad they turned out well after a few hiccups along the way. Sounds like your arms got an extra workout when you broke the spoon. :-)

neil said...

If you broke the spoon the exercise must be working! We all muck things up from time to time, I've got a post coming up about a cake that actually got better due to my stuff up.