Spiced maple biscuits

Who doesn’t love a bit of maple syrup?  The indigenous people of the Americas were the first to harvest maple sap.  One legend credits the humble squirrel with its discovery, telling of a young boy who watched a red squirrel nip at the bark of a maple tree and lap up the sap.  How cute is that?!  I love squirrels and I’m well willing to believe it.

My husband came home from work recently, deeply enamoured of some maple syrup cookies, an office treat from a workmate’s holiday in Canada.  Not one to be outdone by holiday biscuits, I decided to rise to the challenge of making some maple cookies of my own.

I based my biscuits on this lovely recipe, with the addition of some spices as I fancied a little kick.

To make these spiced maple biscuits, you will need:

• 180g butter, melted
• 200g caster sugar
• 1 large egg
• 60ml maple syrup
• 240g plain flour
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon mixed spice
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
• 2 teaspoons baking powder

Begin by melting the butter and once melted, mix in the sugar and leave it to cool.  Melt the butter in a reasonably-sized pot, as the beauty of this recipe is you can make the whole lot in this one pot.  And what’s not to love about less washing-up?

Once the butter and sugar are cool, add the egg and mix in.  Follow with the maple syrup and the vanilla.

Sift in the flour, salt, baking powder and spices and mix to combine.

This will leave you with quite a gloopy mixture (as demonstrated below).  Do not panic!  It now goes into your fridge for at least an hour to chill.

Set your oven to 180 degrees during this time.

Once chilled, scoop teaspoonfuls of the mixture onto a greased baking tray.  The mixture is quite pliable and you can easily shape the biscuits with your fingers.  Sprinkle with some caster sugar and a little cinnamon if you fancy.

Bake them until golden, about 10-12 minutes in my oven, and transfer to a rack to cool.  The mixture makes about 36, if you use teaspoon-sized dollops of the raw dough.

Because I was feeling creative, I topped mine with a little heart-shaped dusting of icing sugar….pretty easy to do, although I warn you, the icing sugar gets everywhere.  If you wish to try this at home (although I understand if you cannot be bothered),  I simply cut the shape out of a piece of stiff cardboard slightly larger than biscuit size, placed the cardboard over the biscuit, and sifted on the icing sugar.  Remove the cardboard and there you have it, a cute little heart plonked on your biscuit.

These go down nicely with a cup of tea!