One of Soph’s co-worker’s is doing a charity bake sale for Kids Company Plate Pledge, and so I’m chipping in some of my bakes to help out.

This week it’s ginger shortbread, based on the America’s Test Kitchen shortbread I’ve done before.

The book says you can just add some minced crystallised ginger (1/2 cup, or in my case the whole pot I’d bought which looked about right) and you’ve got ginger shortbread. Being short on time this evening I decided to use the food processor rather than chop by hand.

Ah… I have a ball of gooey ginger now, not lots of small pieces. So my plan is to beat this into the creamed sugar and butter rather than just mix in. So I lower the butter from 230g to 200g, and beat into 60g of icing sugar, then add the ginger.

Beating this in seems to work!

Then this gets 320g flour and 1/2 tsp salt mixed in until it starts to form a dough.

This then gets kneaded together, wrapped in cling-film, and chilled while we had dinner.

After chilling, the oven goes to 130c fan while the dough gets rolled out between baking parchment sheets.

The top parchment sheet then goes under the bottom on on a baking tray (to help soak up moisture). It then gets scored into fingers.

Then fork holes push through down to the base to avoid air pockets. As you can see the fingers aren’t very even… I should have measured things out instead of rushing!

This then chills in the fridge for 20 mins before having caster sugar sprinkled over it, then baking for 20mins, turning, then another 25mins in the 130c fan oven, until it just looks like it might be starting to get some colour.

As soon as it comes out of the oven it’s cut into individual pieces, then slide the parchment onto a cooling rack for 10mins.

After 10 mins they come off the parchment and cool for another hour before eating. Except for the offcuts which have to be tested right away ;)

The offcuts taste really nice, with about the right amount of ginger. They’re still not cooled properly, so they’re not crispy yet… although with the extra ginger maybe they won’t get as crunchy as plain ones. We’ll see tomorrow, as it’s now bed time!

Update

So they weren’t as crunchy as the plain ones. When I remade them for my mum’s birthday I used the full amount of butter and cooked for near 50 minutes than 45. The extra butter didn’t hurt, and the extra minutes cooking seemed to help. Next time I suggest 25mins / turns 25-30mins when using ginger.