Brown Butter Ginger cookies

Hey Yanni, why don't you make some cookies for us so that we will stop buying them from the supermarket?

Why? Don't you like the store bought ones anymore?

I do like them. But you are supposed to be a cook and a cook that loves baking as you like to call yourself. Besides we said that we must pay attention to our diet from now on.
What does our diet have to do with anything? My cookies will contain sugar and flour like any cookies.

Yes, but at least they will not contain other bad ingredients like palm oil etc..

And that was the winning point.

I know that his favorite cookies are some Ginger cookies that he gets from Waitrose in the UK and brings them over in the suitcase so I set out to find a nice recipe for ginger cookies.

And I found many... TOO MANY! and most of them made with margarine instead of butter. But I almost never use margarine unless for some very specific recipes. And did not want that to be one of them.
The bad thing is that margarine is almost 100% fat. So I could not just substitute margarine with butter in my recipe as butter contains about 15% water and some proteins as well and this needed to be taken into account.

To remove the water from butter there is only one solution. Boil the butter. In a pan.. I used 15% more butter than the recipe ordered for and put it in a pan and brought it to a boil.. It's proteins burned and it got that deep color and flavor and taste that we all love.

The second thing I really had to adjust was the amount of spices especially cinnamon that it is not one of our favorites. So I removed a lot of it and instead I used 5-spices that even though it contains cinnamon it does not have as much.

Last but not least I passed the sugar through the blender and ground it finely which was helpful as it gave the cookies a better texture.

So, let's see the ingredients!!

Diffuculty: 1 of 3

Duration:1 hour including baking and 1 hour of resting the dough in the fridge

Serves:around 70

Ingredients

370 g all purpose flour or cake flour

2 heaped tsps of baking soda

180 g butter

1 heaped teaspoon of ground dried ginger

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp cayen pepper

1 heaped tsp. 5-spices mix

1/2 tsp salt

250 g brown sugar processed through a blender

100 g honey, preferable bitter tasting (from oak or chestnut)

3 tblsp. fresh ginger grated

1 egg and 1 egg yolk

50 g of crystalized sugar for coating the cookies

Method

Place flour and baking soda in a bowl and mix them with a baloon whisk till combined. Leave on the side till we need them.

Place a pan on medium heat and add the butter there. Let it simmer till all water is evaporated and the solids of the butter turn brown and the whole butter takes a lovely brown hue and smells like hazelnut. At that point add the spices in the pan and give them a twirl with a wooden spoon to release their aroma in the butter (most aromatic compounds are fat soluble so it is always better to have the spices mix with the fat in any recipe).

Remove butter and spices from heat and transfer them to a bowl. Add in there the salt, sugar, honey and fresh ginger.

Mix them up with the wooden spoon and quickly mix in the egg and the yolk.

Add the flour mixture. Mix with the spoon till it all combines into a nice dough.

Remove the dough on cling film, wrap it up and place in the fridge for an hour. I like to do a double batch and keep half of the formed cookies in the freezer ready to cook anytime I feel like some nice cookies.

After the dough is nice and chilled we remove it from the oven and form about 70 balls from it each one weighing about 15 g.

Preheat the oven at 150 C fan forced.

Place the balls in a bowl with the 50 g of sugar and roll them around till they are coated with the sugar.

Divide them on two baking sheets that we have covered them with parchment paper.

Bake for about 15 minutes. The cookies will be soft when you take them out of the oven but do not fret. Leave them for a couple of minutes on the pans and then remove them onto a rack to cool down.

Store them in a closed glass jar or other container so that they do not get very hard.