Brandy snaps!

So I had a bit of a Monday evening experimental last night, and decided to make some brandy snaps. Oh, the recipe made them seem so easy and quick! Perhaps the chef who wrote this particular recipe had forgotten how difficult they are to make nicely. But it was such an evolution! This is one of the final ones - one of the few that didn't look like a fudgy mess (which - was not thrown away, but will be added to ice cream in the near future. You could do them on a weeknight - but - with the proviso that you've had a good weekend attempt first, to make your mistakes, smash a few and generally make a mess of things. Then you could very well do them on a weeknight for a fresh little dessert. Food Critic Andrew says these are his favourites! even more so than honey joys - which I had made on Sunday evening, but they didn't last long enough to get a photo of!

Brandy Snaps

Ingredients

90g butter, chopped
1/4 cup golden syrup
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp brandy (if you have some; I don't think they'd be any less yummy without it!)
1/3 cup rice flour

Topping:

300 ml thickened cream
1 tsp vanilla essence
fresh strawberries

Method:

1. Firstly, whip the cream and vanilla essence. Set aside in the fridge.
2. Preheat your oven to 190-200 degrees.
   
3. In a saucepan over medium to high heat, combine butter, golden syrup and sugar and stir until well mixed together and melted. This will take 3-5 minutes
4. Remove from heat and add ginger, brandy and flour. Mix well. At this point I gave up and went and had dinner - so you can easily leave this mixture to cool if you need to.
   
5. Drop onto a lined baking tray, 1 tsp of the mixture. They spread very far, so only 2 or so per tray. You will work out how much they spread after the first couple!
6. Bake for 5-8 minutes, until mixture has spread and appears "lacy"
7. Remove from heat, and let them cool a little bit until they are slightly firm.
   
8. At this point, you should be able to place the biscuits on a greased, upturned glass, and gently shape them into baskets (if you want to do them as traditional cigar shapes, wrap them around a greased baking spoon)
9. Put the whole thing in the fridge until cool and firmed, and they should slide off the glass easily. Fill with cream and strawberries, and listen to the accolades!

Enjoy. I had a lot of fun making these.

Cheeky portion note - for mine - I simply had a larger portion of strawberries, and a small dollop of cream. No one even noticed! They were too busy eating theirs.