Chocolate Chip Gingernut Biscuits

Cold winter days call for pots of tea and ‘dunky biscuits’, the iconic British tradition of dipping ones biscuit into your tea! It’s a fine art, dunking it long enough to warm the biscuit through but not so long that it plops off into your cup causing a unattractive floating sludge….. I’m speaking from experience. Perhaps for those unfamiliar with dunking, it may seems a little ‘crass’ but it’s an old tradition that I imagine came from the need to dunk when biscuits were very dry and hard and now we refuse to let the tradition go. The best biscuits to dunk, for me, are the Gingernut which are crisp or the Rich Tea biscuit that is plain but needs a little more skill in the dunk. Believe it or not, there are dunking competitions in Britain…we are a little eccentric aren’t we?

So what food traditions do you have that others might find bizarre?

Ingredients
50g chopped dark chocolate, 70%
1 tsp ground ginger
110g self raising flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
50g butter
50g sugar
50g runny honey or golden syrup (2 tbsp)

Method
Pre heat oven to 180C.
Sift flour, ginger and bicarbonate of soda into a bowl.
Rub butter into flour until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs, you can use a food processor, then add the sugar and chopped chocolate.
Add the honey/golden syrup and mix everything with a spoon, finish off by squeezing the mixture together with your hands.
Divide the mixture into 12, and roll each portion into a ball.
Place on the lined baking sheet, well spaced out as they will spread quite a bit during baking, flatten each one slightly.
Bake on the centre shelf for 15-20 minutes, or until they have spread out and turned cracked and craggy.
Cool on the baking tray for a few minutes then, using a palette knife, remove to a wire rack to cool completely.