My great grandma's ginger biscuits: a recipe from her to you

Everyone loves a good old-fashioned family recipe, right? I certainly do and there's no shortage of them in my family to go around. One of my favourites is one for ginger biscuits that comes from my great-grandmother. Her family was from the small village of Coniston in Cumbria, somewhere that's most well-known these days thanks to its connection with Donald Campbell and his numerous attempts at breaking the water speed record on Coniston Water. Some of her family were hoteliers in the area and there are quite a few recipes from the hotel's kitchen that my family still have (you'll likely be seeing a few of those pop up sometime soon...).

These ginger biscuits are a great example of some classic pre-war baking that still really holds up today. They taste absolutely fantastic (especially when they're still warm from the oven!) and they're not too difficult to make. One batch of dough can really last a good while too, as you can get up to 20 cookies out of it depending on how big you want the cookies to be. Once you've finished baking them you can store any leftover cookies in an airtight tin or freeze them (they freeze really well) for if you want a really great little homemade snack at a later time. Your friends and family will absolutely love them.

(NB: we use self-raising flour in this recipe. This may not be available where you are. If you need to make your own self-raising flour, Nigella Lawson has posted this guide on how to make your own. Just replace the self-raising flour in the recipe with Nigella's method and you'll be good to go.)

Great-grandma's ginger biscuits

A good old-fashioned recipe for some absolutely lovely ginger biscuits

Prep time10min

Cook time10min

Total time20min

Serves10

Ingredients

• 4 oz margarine
• 2 tablespoons of black treacle
• 1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
• 1 egg
• 12 oz of self-raising flour (substitute for the method linked above if you can't get self-raising flour)
• 8 oz of granulated sugar
• 2 teaspoons of ground ginger

Instructions

1. Warm the margarine & treacle in a large pan until the margarine melts.
2. Add the other ingredients into the pan and mix them all together.
3. Roll the mixture into walnut-sized balls.
4. Bake at 180 degrees C (fan)/200 degrees C (non-fan) or gas mark 6 for about 10 minutes until the balls have gone flattish and look cracked.

Recipe Notes

The biscuits will be very soft when they come out of the oven! You'll also need to be very careful not to burn them while they're in the oven - don't leave them in for any longer than about 10 mins! Don't make the cookies too big either because then they'll burn on the edges and not cook properly in the centre.

Recipe by

My great-grandma, who passed it on to us through the generations!