Wishing all of you and your families all the best for Christmas – may this year be your most blessed and may all your recipes work out perfectly. We have tried, in the past few weeks to accommodate as many countries as we were able to but since information takes quite a while to collect, we didn’t manage all of them. Should your country have been neglected, please accept our apologies – we will try and rectify this next year. However, we urge to to look at the posts written in November and December of 2008 because we had a look at most of the European countries and tried, this year, to bring you new ones.

Should anyone have any queries or require any assistance, drop us a line and we’ll see what we can do. As a Christmas gift we include, herewith, a recipe for the tastiest ginger biscuits around.

GINGER BISCUITS

Ingredients

• 250g unsalted butter
• 200 g dark muscovado sugar
• 7 tbsp golden syrup
• 600g cake flour
• 2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 4 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp ground cardamom seeds

Method

• Heat oven to 200 C.
• Melt the butter, the sugar and the syrup in a saucepan.
• Mix the flour, the bicarbonate of soda, the ground ginger and the cardamom  into a large bowl and then stir in the butter mixture to make a stiff dough.
• If it won’t quite come together, add a tiny splash of water.
• Roll out thinly and cut out in any shapes you like – if you don’t have any, use a glass.
• These biscuits become quite hard and smaller shapes are more suitable.
• If you prefer, decorate with chocolate or with royal icing and any decorations that you can think of.