Eat Your Way Out of Insanity: Ginger Sables

Lack of sleep turns people into crazy heaps of chaos and disarray. You become irrational and volatile, where even the slightest matter could turn you into a homicidal maniac.

And when you have been working night shifts, seven nights in a row in fact, you start coming up with absurd titles for posts (apologies for that momentary lapse) and you begin to crave anything with sugar. I finished a 12-hour shift Saturday morning and then went to the Good Food and Wine Show (will post about it when I recover), and then went back for another night shift and here I am again, with six hours and thirty minutes to go. I am insanity personified. So, to keep me from going gaga in my little air-conditioned dungeon I brought some Ginger Sables that I made not too long ago. As long as I have something sweet to graze on I am okay.

Ginger Sables

140g unsalted butter
100g icing sugar
1 egg
2½ tsp ground ginger
¼ tsp ground cinnamon
2 cups all purpose flour
½ tsp baking powder

Sift together ground ginger, cinnamon, flour and baking powder. Set aside.
In another bowl, beat butter and sugar until light and creamy. Then add the egg and beat until incorporated.
Slowly add the flour mixture and beat until well blended, but be careful not to overwork the dough.
Divide the dough into two batches and wrap each one in plastic wrap and refrigerate for an hour or until firm.
Preheat the oven to 180°C and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Remove one portion of dough from the refrigerator and place on a well floured surface and roll the dough out until it is about half a centimeter thick. Using a round cookie cutter cut out as many cookies as possible, and place them carefully onto the baking sheet. Place the baking sheet into the refrigerator once again to chill the dough for a further 15-20 minutes.
Remove the cookies from the refrigerator and bake them in the oven for about 10-12 minutes, or until the edges are slightly browned. Cool the cookies for 5 minutes and transfer to a wire rack to cool further. Dust some icing sugar on top to finish off.

In my lack of patience I didn't refrigerate the dough for a second time and the cookies did't hold their shape very well. As you can see in the photos, the cookies are quite flat. They spread a bit more than I anticipated, so it is actually important to refrigerate the dough a second time.

in the dungeon

And for things non-food-related, what helped me through the night-shifts other than the Ginger Sables?

Possibly one of the good things to come out of staying up these ridiculous hours is chancing upon truly weird and wonderful websites. Like this one called Steve, Don’t Eat It! Steve, will eat anything, and each post is dedicated to eating a certain food that would normally nauseate normal people. He eats anything between potted meat, to his wife’s breast milk, and in my opinion the worst one yet, prison wine. He is one brave/stupid man. Only check out this website if you can stomach his misadventures in “food”.

If reading about a man eating pickled pig skin isn’t your thing, then maybe head over to Cute Overload. There’s something about looking at cute furry animals that just takes away the tensions in life. And for those cat lovers, or haters, here’s Stuff On My Cat. This is really funny at 3am in the morning.

Also Mae Gabriel of the food blog riceandnnodles also has a photography blog called pixels. She lives on an island off the coast of France and the UK called Jersey Islands and her photos reflect the beauty and stunning landscapes of this place. Definitely worth checking out.