Apple Cider Candied Ginger Biscuit (A.K.A. cookie) アップルサイダーと生姜生姜の砂糖漬ビスケット

This is another one of my wife’s baking projects which she made after getting some apple cider.  She found this recipe in the “Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook”. Although this is called “Biscuit” this is not the American idea of a “biscuit” which is generally a buttery flaky type of muffin. Instead this is a type of shortbread which the British may call a biscuit but Americans would call a cookie.* In any case it is made with apple cider.

The usual way of making cookies is to roll out the dough, cut out the cookie using a cookie cutter then re-rolling out the scraps to make more cookies, my wife made a modification to the procedure. She rolled the dough into a cylinder then cut slices off of the cylinder eliminating the need to gather scraps and re-roll the dough.

*Digression alert: Biscuit or ビスケット” in Japan also means British-style cookie. When I was a kid in Sapporo, we grew up with “biscuits” from “Saka Biscuit 坂ビスケット”.  They were packaged in a paper cellophane covered cylindrical wrapping. To my surprise this company is still in operation in Sapporo. They still produce several kinds of  “biscuits” but the cookies are now sold in a bag not wrapped in a cylinder like I remember. (Surprise: I found that apparently I am repeating myself since I wrote about the same thing 10 years ago.)

Ingredients:
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
⅓ cup packed brown sugar
2 tablespoons molasses
¼ cup apple cider or juice
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon ground ginger
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ cup finely minced candied (crystallized) ginger

Directions:
Cream the butter and sugar in a mixer bowl. Beat in the molasses, then the apple cider. In a separate bowl combine the flour, ground ginger, baking soda. Stir the flour mixture into the butter mixture. (I found this almost impossible to do by hand using a spatula. I resorted to stirring the flour mixture into the butter mixture using the mixer which took only seconds and worked much better.) Stir in the candied ginger. I rolled the dough into a cylinder then wrapped it in plastic wrap (#1) and refrigerated 1 hour. After taking the wrapped dough out of the refrigerator, I simply cut slices off the cylinder to make the cookies (#2). 

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper. Bake until lightly browned, about 15 minutes (#3 & #4)

This was a very flavorful cookie. It has a strong apple cider flavor and pleasing bursts of ginger. The only problem was that it became very hard once it cooled. Luckily just a short microwaving made it soft again