Today is Good Friday and the shops are shut so I couldn't fulfill my sugar cravings through the supermarket. Instead I actually had to bake something. The horror! Here's the recipe for ginger biscuits that my mum gave me:
Equipment:
- Saucepan
- Wooden spoon
- Metal tray
- Baking paper
- A plate to put dirty utensils on
- Keep some small spoons or forks nearby, you'll find them useful for the golden syrup.
Ingredients:
- 100g butter/margarine
- 80g soft brown suger, or substitute granulated sugar
- 4 tbsp golden syrup
- 2 tsp ginger powder
- 220g self-raising flour, or substitute plain flour plus 2 tsp baking powder
- 2 tsp baking soda
Instructions:
- Set the oven to 190°C.
- Add the 100g margarine, the 80g sugar, and the 4 tbsp golden syrup to the saucepan.
- Put the saucepan with ingredients on the hob. Set the hob to very low heat. Stir the ingredients with a wooden spoon until they're all combined, but not too runny.
- Turn off the hob and move the saucepan off it.
- Add the 2 tsp of ginger powder, or more if you like ginger. Mix it in.
- Add the 2 tsp of baking soda. Mix it in.
- If you are planning to use plain flour (instead of self-raising), add the 2 tsp baking powder.
- Add the 220g of flour to the saucepan, slowly. Add a bit, then stir, until it's mixed in. If you add too much at once it'll be tricky to mix in.
- If after adding most of the flour the result feels firm, dry, and impossible to add any more flour to, you can skip adding the rest of the flour.
- Put baking paper on the tray.
- With your hands, pick out a golf ball sized piece of mixture and put it on the baking paper on the tray. Use a fork or spoon to flatten it slightly.
- Keep adding more pieces of mixture like that. Remember, they'll expand significantly in the oven, so space them apart!
- Once the tray is full, put it into the oven (on 190°C) for 8 minutes. If you want to leave the biscuits in longer, make sure that the bottom of them doesn't get burned.
- Once you get the tray out, the biscuits will be floppy, but they'll hold together more after they cool down. Carefully take them off the tray and put them on a plate. If you have more mixture left, repeat by putting it on the tray until it's all gone.
- Eat all of the biscuits, you deserve them.
With social distancing in effect the supermarket has rules about how you can travel through it. They're trying to create a flow of people rather than having people bump past each other both ways in the aisles. I'm making a webapp which will let us track which aisle each item is in, and then once we add items to the list in the app, it'll arrange them into the order of which aisle they're in, so that we can make one clean sweep through the shops. I've done a similar kind of thing with mkx-browser, so this shouldn't be too challenging. I'm not using React, Flux, or any things like that, just vanilla JS and some tools that I've written myself. Writing vanilla JS is actually good now that we have classes, promises, and modules.
We get the next week off university (Easter break) so I'll have plenty of time to work on my personal projects, assuming that I can get my motivation up. Looking at the clock right now, apparently I got my motivation up quite a bit too much tonight. See you next time.
— Cadence
