Food writer Nicola Miller, from Bury St Edmunds, shares her recipe for spiced pear and stem ginger cookies
I used to bake cookies or biscuits at least once a week. They were usually quite basic: the dough would be flavoured with chocolate chips, mixed spice, oat-raisin, nuts, peanut butter or chopped fresh fruit and dropped onto a greased metal sheet using a spoon. Fifteen minutes later, the cookies would be done, and the process of keeping the kids away until they were cool enough to touch would begin. Like most children, mine were ravenously hungry when they got home from school or the childminder, so a cookie, some sliced fruit and a drink would keep them going until dinner was served. Making my own made it easier to limit the flood of cookies and biscuits made with corn syrup or palm oil from unsustainable sources that would otherwise find their way into the house. There wasn’t a complete ban on shop-bought, though; Maryland cookies were a big deal, and I wasn’t going to deny them an occasional Wagon Wheel, Fig Roll (my son’s favourite), Chocolate Digestive, Jammie Dodger or Funny Face either. But in the nineties and early noughties, ingredients and power were relatively less expensive; you could knock up a batch of homemade cookies or biscuits without breaking the bank. Nowadays, with butter costing at least £2 for 250g, they feel more special.
There’s something so compellingly homespun about homemade cookies despite a recent plethora of modern, transcultural, trend-led cookbooks that meld ingredients and techniques from other culinary genres to produce cooling racks filled with startlingly original and very unrustic-looking cookies. Yet as amazing as these cookies are, they don’t trigger within me an urge to break out the cookie sheets in the way a humbler cookie recipe might do. Still, having spent the last few weeks reading review copies of soon-to-be-published cookie cookbooks, the realisation that I probably haven’t baked cookies for at least five years (and possibly even longer), despite owning at least 30 well-read cookie-baking books, shocked me. But our family's eating and cooking habits have changed. We’re a household of two now, and a baking sheet studded with 12 fat cookies would take us all week to plough through, no matter how fabulous they are. And I like variety; I don’t want to eat the same cookie (or any baked good) every day. Homemade cookies have been relegated to the past, and it’s mainly a numbers game; most baking recipes are not written with small households in mind.
Some food writers recognise this. Nigella’s recipe for Mine-All-Mine Sweet and Salty Chocolate Cookies in her most recent cookbook, ‘Cook Eat Repeat’, comes to mind: “The lone-dweller, in need of the balm that only a freshly-baked biscuit can provide, is faced with a most unsatisfactory choice: do without or make a batch big enough to keep a huge hungry household happy,” she writes. “I had to put that right, and not just out of altruism, you understand,” she adds, giving us a recipe that makes just two (albeit huge) cookies – one to eat now, and one for later. I think this is a great idea, although (hypocritically) I haven’t followed Nigella’s lead; my recipe for Pear and Stem Ginger Sultana Cookies makes 12 instead of two and was inspired by memories of baking for my young family. Obviously, this means a yield of 12 cookies per batch. However, these cookies can be frozen separately (or in pairs) to defrost at will if, like me, you approach freshly-baked goods like a bear in a bin or your household is a small one. All you need is the willpower to put them straight into the freezer the moment they are cool enough to do so.
As for its inspiration, when the kids were small, I 'invented' a pear and ginger pudding, using the time-honoured 'chuck a load of ingredients into a baking dish and mix' method. I'd roughly chop ripe pears, sticky balls of stem ginger, and a handful of dried fruits, then stir it all into the usual butter/brown sugar/flour/egg or oil blend before baking in the oven. Once it was done, I’d plonk the baking dish on the table and everyone would dig in, adding cream, custard or scoops of vanilla ice cream. These cookies taste very similar and are a great way to resurrect those subpar pears you purchased in the hope that they will transform into drippingly succulent fruits after a couple of days in the fruit bowl. If you’ve been disappointed (yet again!), don't bother eating them raw. Bake my cookies instead.
I’d describe this as a store cupboard recipe, that is, they use a lot of odds and ends that happen to be in my kitchen. Yours may differ. I always have a couple of jars of stem ginger in the cupboard because I absolutely love it (Delia Smith is a big fan too). If you haven’t used it before, visit the baking section in stores and look for clear jars filled with dense little balls of ginger preserved in a heavy, spicy sugar syrup. It is more useful than you might think. I add it to countless baked goods and pour the leftover syrup over baked fruit, Greek yoghurt, or ice cream; you get the idea. A little goes a long way flavour-wise (helpful in these expensive times), but I used two whole balls in this recipe to give a more powerful hit, adding sultanas because I love them (but you could sub in raisins, mixed dried fruit, finely-chopped dried apricots, figs or prunes). The Dutch Speculaas spice blend is another personal choice, but there's no reason why you couldn't use a standard mixed spice blend. Like many cookie recipes, there’s scope to play around.
SPICED PEAR AND STEM GINGER COOKIES (makes 12)
Ingredients:
1 large egg
270g soft brown sugar
110g soft salted butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
240g plain flour
1.5 teaspoons baking powder
2 small balls of stem ginger, minced as finely as possible
2 teaspoons speculaas spices, or 1 teaspoon of cinnamon and 1 teaspoon of ginger, or 2 teaspoons of mixed spice
1 medium Conference pear - peeled, cored and diced into tiny cubes
100g sultanas
Method:
1. Bring your oven temperature to 175°C/350°F.
2. Grease your baking sheets with butter.
3. Break the egg into a bowl and whisk until foamy.
4. Place the butter and sugar in a roomy bowl and beat until smooth and creamy. You can do this by hand or in a mixer.
5. Add the beaten egg and vanilla to the butter and sugar, and stir until everything is blended. Add the chopped pears and stem ginger to the cookie dough and mix.
6. Put the flour, baking powder and spice mix into a separate bowl and stir until combined.
7. Slowly add the flour mixture to your cookie dough until it is just combined. Ensure the fruit is well-distributed throughout.
8. Using a tablespoon, dollop little mounds of the dough onto your greased baking sheets. It will be a little stiff, and that's good. The cookie dough needs to be sturdy enough to support the fruit.
9. Bake in the oven for 12-15 minutes until the cookies are golden brown but retain enough softness to spring back after you (gently) prod them. Start checking them after 10 minutes because every oven is different. Allow to cool (or not!) before eating.
Follow Nicola on Twitter: @Nicmillerstale
Winner of the Guild of Food Writers Online Food Writer Award 2020
Fortnum & Mason Cookery Writer of the Year 2022