Sunday, April 26: When lockdown was flagged I didn’t rush out and panic-buy flour because baking is not really my thing and there is only one person here to eat it. In the past few weeks I’ve made a fruit cake and Anzac biscuits (and given some of this away) and today I’m making my mother’s ginger crunch biscuits to mark the anniversary of her death, on this day in 1984.
My mother was a champion baker. She was also very modest and she never entered her baking in A&P Shows and similar. She reserved her work for her appreciative family, and friends who came for afternoon tea. Sometime in my childhood she commissioned a special baking table to be made by a local cabinetmaker. It had a wide Formica surface and drawers to hold her equipment. It was her pride and joy. I think Margot and I helped her on baking days but my memory is more about scraping the leftovers of the mixing bowls and eating gorgeous creamy-buttery-spicy confections. Mum’s signature marshmallow slice could be traded at school for anything I fancied and there was an annoying time at Cambridge Intermediate when someone regularly pinched it from my lunchbox.
With so much to live up to, I became a nervous baker. And I’ve never quite grasped that you can’t go off-piste with baking in the same way as other forms of cooking. It is chemistry, as people have gently explained, you have to follow the recipe. I tried hard when I had my own home but there were as many flops as successes. Once I pretended to Mum that a beautiful fruit loaf (bought from a home-cookery) was my own and she spotted the fraud immediately. She asked for the recipe, and I was undone.
Nowadays, I have a few faithful party pieces, including fruit cakes. I surpassed myself some years back by making Campbell and Ellen’s wedding cake but I think when my sons are listing the good things they remember from their childhood, home-baking will not be among them. They both do better scones than me.
I’ve been revisiting Mum’s hand-written cookbook during lockdown. She had two of them, and Margot has the other one, known as the “Bird Book” because it has an image of a bird on the cover. Recipes are neatly recorded by Mum in fountain pen. Some of them, in my opinion, are way too cryptic, they assume knowledge. Mum rarely says what size baking tin to use, she vaguely notes “bake in a moderate” oven, and sometimes she just lists ingredients but no method of assembly.
She was only 64 when she died of cancer, and she’d never had a day’s illness until then. It’s a long time ago but I remember it was a beautiful sunny autumn that year, just like now. So today, with the sun streaming into the kitchen, I put together her recipe for ginger crunch biscuits. This one is cryptic, too. It’s actually a slice, not biscuits, so I use Mum’s original Swiss roll tin. It’s dead simple, even I can manage it. Great with a cup of tea.
Ginger Crunch Biscuits
115g butter
55g sugar
1 cup flour
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp baking powder
Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy, mix in dry ingredients and press out in a Swiss roll tin (roughly 29cm by 19cm), greased or lined with baking paper. My mixture didn’t quite fill the tin but of course that may have been slack-method measuring and my electronic scales need a new battery so I had to guess at the butter. Bake at 180 dec C for 15 minutes, or thereabouts.
Topping: 4 tbsp icing sugar, 1 tsp ground ginger, 1 heaped tbsp butter, 1 dsp golden syrup, ½ tsp lemon essence (I did a squeeze of lemon juice). Melt ingredients gently in a pot, ice the slice while both are still warm.
Note: We are on the cusp of take-out coffees and home-delivered food. Huge excitement in my bubble! Can’t wait to eat something I haven’t made myself, and also to support local businesses. Many of the Waikato favourites will be offering contactless pick-ups and delivery services; Waikato Food Inc has put together a great round-up of such places.
See www.waikatofoodinc.com/support-local
