This week I made ginger sandwich cookies and golly golly gosh are they delicious. I always use baking soda and baking powder interchangeably or if the recipe says ‘baking soda’ I’ll do half baking powder and half baking powder because science. They’re soft and rose a fair amount so they don’t look like the images on the recipe … I’m getting a suspicion that my science is not as effective as I thought.

I’m writing this on Christmas day. Merry Christmas. I’m sure you think I have better things to do like eat turkey, drink prosecco for breakfast, and stand around in a circle with my family all cross-armed and interlinked with Christmas crackers, talking about how much we love each other. But no, I’m vegetarian so no turkey and my parents don’t drink at all. One time Mum saw a photo of me at a party with a glass of wine and started yelling at me that I was an alcoholic — so no, no prosecco at all. We don’t go in hard for Christmas, it’s become a kind of joke amongst ourselves. We’re not a very family family and we know that and are happy that way. Every year my Sister, Mum, and I ask Dad constantly about when he’s going to put the decorations up, and he always says he has ‘big things planned for this year’. Then on Christmas Eve he’ll pull out this five by three-inch toy Christmas tree, put it on the side amongst a load of crap they should’ve thrown out years ago and say ‘ta da’.

One Christmas when I was around ten I read a whole book in my room all day. I’ve never finished a book in one day apart from that Christmas and I remember enjoying it so much. Christmas for us is more of a day off, Jesus or no Jesus my parents are just glad they don’t have to work. However, we do have two Christmas traditions. One is that my sister and I run a Christmas 10k but this year she decided to do her first marathon and I joined her for 14k to get her from 20k to 34k which she prophesied would be the hardest bit. I know she was the one who ran the marathon but I’d been to the pub the night before and woke up hungover with heavy eyelids and a mouth glued shut from dehydration, so I think it was equally hard for us both. In the first few metres I felt a twinge in my foot as if someone had pinched inside and was trying to pull out a thread. Slightly concerning but it improved from then on and the run was fun. I went to meet her at the end with a rope which I tied around a bollard and pulled across the street with a piece of paper stuck to it which said ‘FINISH’. When she got to me, she still had a hundred metres to go before crossing. I stood with the rope in hand watching her going round and round in small circles, feeling the desired triumphant effect weaken with every orbit.

The other tradition is that in the evening we play cards for money. We play a Japanese game called Page-One, where the basic aim is to shed all your cards to win. My Dad will pay £20, my mum £10 and my sister £5. The winner gets £20, second place £10, third, £5, and the loser gets nothing — my Dad is always the loser somehow. It’s fun and I usually place second but if I’m last my parents give me some money anyway. My Dad has changed my childhood bedroom into his office now, although it still has my bed in it so I can sleep there. He was always going on about doing it but he never did so I never thought he would, and when I went home and saw this massive desk in my room, my bookshelves gone, and my bed squidged into the corner next to the radiator I felt hard done by. I’ve lived more years of my life in that room than outside of it and now it didn’t feel like mine anymore, even though I could still see the stain from where I’d once killed a spider with a broom, and the bald spot from where I’d stuck up Big Bang Theory posters and taken off the paint with the Blutack. Sleeping here now, my pillow is right next to the radiator which wakes me up at night by filling my head with a warm panging. It’s clear that my room is no longer optimised for sleeping or really for me at all. It’s only fair, I haven’t lived there properly in years and they should use the space, besides I’m not the one paying the mortgage. But I don’t like that it’s not my room anymore and I feel like a spoiled child about to have a tantrum. I know I’ll get over it soon enough, I just need to stamp my feet and frown for a while and then I’ll forget about it with no resolution except that I’ve stopped being so unreasonable.

I was planning to bake these biscuits at my parent’s house because my family eats a lot of biscuits. Then I realised that nothing I made would ever top the classic plain Digestive or chocolate Hobnob that they love so loyally so came back to central to do them. They are very tasty, I was careful not to overfill as the filling is very sweet and would overpower the cookie. I am working a bit over the break so will take them to the office to share with the few colleagues who will be in.

Goodbye for now 🙂

Here’s the recipe I used.

Watch the reel