Camp Fairings
Spiced ginger biscuits baked in a dutch oven at camp, or baked at home and carried.
- calories
- 110
- weight
- 0.8 oz
- cal / oz
- 138
- protein
- 1 g
- serves
- 11, scales
- prep
- 10 min
- cook
- 15 min
- total time
- 25 min
- water
- none
- cost
- $
Calorie and protein figures are my own estimates, good enough for planning a food bag and not meant as precise nutrition data.
- Snack
- Dessert
- Dutch oven
- Campfire coals
- Car camping
- Basecamp
- Backpacking
- Vegetarian
- Nut free
- Real dishes
- Pre-mix at home
- Shelf stable
- Basic
Ingredients
| All-purpose flour | 100 g | about 3/4 cup |
|---|---|---|
| Ground ginger | 1/4 tsp | |
| Ground cinnamon | 1/4 tsp | |
| Ground nutmeg | a scrape | |
| Salt | a pinch | |
| Baking soda | 1 1/2 tsp | not a typo, this is what cracks them |
| Butter | 50 g | softened; shortening works and keeps better in a hot car |
| Sugar | 50 g | |
| Golden syrup | 2 1/2 tbsp | light corn syrup is a fine stand-in |
Method
- At home, whisk the flour, spices, salt, and baking soda together and bag it. Carry the butter, sugar, and syrup separately.
- In camp, get a bed of coals going. You want about 8 briquettes under a 10-inch dutch oven and 14 on the lid, or an equivalent spread of hardwood coals.
- Rub the butter into the dry mix with your fingers until it looks like sand. Stir in the sugar.
- Warm the syrup jar next to the fire for a minute so it pours, then work it in. The mix stays crumbly until you press it, then it holds.
- Roll dessert-spoon lumps into balls and space them well apart on a greased pan or on parchment in the oven. They spread more than you expect.
- Bake 10 minutes. Lift the oven off the coals, set it down hard on a flat rock or the ground, and put it back. The drop is what cracks the tops.
- Bake 5 more minutes, then get them out and let them cool on the lid. They are soft leaving the heat and crisp two minutes later.
These are old Cornish market biscuits, and the whole point is the crack across the top. That comes from an absurd amount of baking soda plus a physical shock partway through baking: you drop the hot pan, the risen dough falls, and the surface splits. Skip the drop and you get a plain domed cookie.
A dutch oven handles this fine because the recipe is short and forgiving on temperature. Golden syrup is the one ingredient worth carrying rather than substituting, though corn syrup does the same job of keeping them chewy in the middle. Shortening instead of butter if the cooler is not part of the trip.
Packing
Dry mix in one bag. Butter in a small screw-top tub, syrup in another. Baked fairings travel in a rigid container or they turn to gravel in a pack.
Variations
- Bake them at home and carry them. They keep a week in a tin and are better trail food than most bars.
- Double the ginger if you want them to actually taste like ginger.
https://hedgecombers.com/cornish-fairings-biscuit-recipe