Gingerbread men are the traditional shape for this biscuit, but if you don’t have a person-shaped cutter to hand you can make them any shape you like. We chose cats, but if you cut them into strips they are ideal for dunking, and ginger dunks particularly well into tea.

These biscuits differ considerably to ginger cookies, in that they don’t contain any salt, and they use plain flour rather than self raising flour. As such, they stay a lot flatter and they don’t have a cracked and broken top characteristic of ginger cookies. This makes them particularly well-suited to decorating with icing, allowing you to add clothing and faces to your gingerbread men, or whiskers and stripes to your cats. They are also often decorated at Christmas time and hung on trees.

The following recipe, which needn’t be followed religiously, and the quantities for which can be varied slightly depending on what you have in your store cupboard is sufficient for around 30 average-sized biscuits, although it depends largely on the size of your cutter. You’ll get more cats, but fewer men.

The ingredient you may like to vary the most is the ground ginger. Four teaspoons, as specified below, makes for a fairly hot biscuit. Two teaspoons is considerably milder.

Ingredients
320g (11oz) plain flour
100g (3.5oz) of butter
100g (3.5oz) of dark muscovado sugar
4 tablespoons of golden syrup
4 teaspoons of ground ginger
1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda

Equipment needed
Saucepan
Rolling pin
Cookie cutter (or knife)
Mixing bowl
Hob or stove
Oven
Baking tray

Method
Combine your dry ingredients - the flour, ginger and bicarbonate of soda - in a large mixing bowl and put to one side. Place the butter, sugar and syrup in a pan and melt over a gentle heat. Keep stirring until all of the sugar has melted in the syrup and butter, and you have a smooth dark liquid in the bottom of the pan. Avoid letting it either boil, or burn onto the bottom of the pan. Don’t let it get too hot and bubble, as it could spit.

Being very careful - it will be hot - pour this into the dry ingredients and use a wooden spoon to mix them together until they form a solid mass. You should now have a dark brown ball of pastry ready for cutting, with no evidence of any of the dry ingredients in it. If you can see white flecks of flour, then it needs more thorough mixing.

Sprinkle your worktop with a little flour and place the ball on it for rolling. Roll this until it is around 5mm (0.2in) thick, cut out your shapes and transfer them to greased baking trays. Place these in an oven pre-heated to 170 degrees Celsius (340 degrees Fahrenheit) and bake for 10 minutes.

While this first batch is baking, gather up the off-cuts of your mixture, form them back into a ball and then roll them out for a second (and, if necessary, third) time to cut more shapes. You’ll find that the quality of the mixture degrades with each re-rolling, so if possible cut as many shapes from each rolling as you can to reduce the number of times you have to handle it.

Once baked, remove them from the trays and allow to cool, preferably on wire racks.

Do you have a similar recipe or a variation on this one? Leave a note in the comments below.

We had a spare pineapple - had to use it in a photo

We’ve finally cracked open the sloe gin. It’s been slowly fermenting for the last four months, since we headed out into the meadow to pick sloe berries from the blackthorn trees. Each one is a small olive-like fruit with a dusty purple-black skin. Inside they are a delicate pink, and each one has a tiny stone in the middle.

To make sloe gin you need to gather enough to fill half of whichever bottle you want to make it in, and add the same weight of sugar. Pierce each of your sloe berries with a pin, going straight through the middle if you can manage to miss the stone, or coming in from each side if you can’t. This breaks open the skin and lets the gin and the berry juices mix.

You should pick your sloes in the autumn, so there will be none in the hedgerows now, but if you can wait until after the first frosts then the skins will already have been broken, and so piercing may not be necessary.

When you’ve got all that in the bottle you pour in your gin, stopper it up and leave it to brew for at least three months. Give it a shake once a week or so to mix in all the sugar and don’t open it until it’s all fully dissolved into the liquid. We finally opened ours this weekend, and drank the first two glasses as undiluted shots.

It is very, very sweet, and has a syrupy quality not present in regular gin. The colour is a fantastic deep red, and any sloes that come out with the liquid - which can be eaten if you want, although we chose not to - float on the top like cocktail olives.

A bonus of the fermenting process is that you can use a cheaper gin than you might otherwise like to drink. We used a supermarket’s own-brand spirit, and you’d never taste the difference between this and a more expensive label when infused with the sloes.

Fortunately, as we discovered quite by chance when the cat misjudged one of his seat-to-sofa leaps, spilt sloe gin washes out of the carpet quite easily with a mild detergent, leaving only a gentle pink blush to remind you of the fun you had in making and drinking it.

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We’re rapidly moving into spring. The trees are starting to bud, and there is blossom in the nature reserve next to the house. Even the cat grass has started to grow, and I’d largely thought that was a lost cause.

So this weekend we pulled on our boots and headed out to the plot to bring in the last of the carrots and sprouts, turn out another bag of potatoes and assess the cabbages and leeks.

We had an impressive haul. 600g of sprouts, 1.2kg of potatoes and 2.5kg of carrots. We even found a beetroot that had somehow slipped through the net when took them in last September, which despite the ice and frosts looks good enough to eat, so that added a further 60g to the total for 2007.

We left the leeks in the ground along with the cabbage, which is still a bit too leggy for my liking. We have more home produce to eat than we can cope with right now, so it looks like we’ll be blanching some of those sprouts and freezing them. We made the carrots into a big batch of carrot and coriander soup, along with six of the potatoes.

We were pleasantly surprised by the potatoes. They’ve been in their grow bags for almost nine months now, and we thought that they may have started to rot. Only one had gone bad, though, and the rest were all fine. They peeled easily, and the flesh inside was a wonderful paper white.

We couldn’t say the same for all of the carrots. Some were fine, but others had been nibbled in the ground and some had black bits. One of them looked distinctly furious at having been dug up.

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self sufficiency, self+sufficiency, vegetables

Wind turbines generate more controversy than electricity. While research suggests that some yield less power in the course of a year than it would take to illuminate a lightbulb, your decision to erect one in the garden can have neighbours up in arms. And while local authorities are becoming more amenable to the idea of small-scale renewable energy generation, it is still - technically - necessary to get planning permission before putting one up.

Hopefully things should get easier as more efficient, smaller and quieter models are rolled out. Last year’s BSI Sustainability Design Awards highlighted work in this area, with first place taken by Ben Storan’s radical vertical turbine. Storan (right), an MA graduate in Industrial Design Engineering from the Royal College of Art, developed his more efficient turbine in conjunction with Imperial College, turning traditional designs on their side to take advantage of slower rotational speed.

That’s important in built-up urban areas, which aren’t ideally suited to turbine siting as surrounding buildings impede the free flow of passing air. This new design should generate up to three times the amount of energy put out by a traditional turbine without any increase in wind speed; that’s about 1.2kW with winds of 12 metres per second.

A welcome side effect is far quieter operation, which should do much to ease neighbours’ concerns and smooth the planning application. The design is unusual and fairly attractive, but it’s still not all that small, with an overall height of 4 metres, and a span of 2.5 metres.

Interest in the project has been strong, and by his own admission the last few months have been ‘hectic’ for inventor Storan. He had a show in LA for Wired magazine, and travelled to Peru to shoot the pilot for an American TV show called Imagine This.

He bagged £3000 for taking first place in the BSI Awards, which will be used to research and realise his design, which now forms a part of his Mphil project, alongside research into the design aspects and consumer opinions and usage of domestic wind turbines, particularly in urban areas.

‘I have had a few offers for putting it into production,’ he told Blagger. ‘I am determined to put a thorough phase of testing and evaluation in first. The first prototype should be ready in the coming months.’

If all goes well, that prototype could lead to a modified version of the turbine hitting the market some time next year. It’s enough to have us holding off on investing in a traditional turbine for the next 12 months at least.

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Fresh eggs every morning. You can’t beat them - especially not if you plucked them from under the chicken yourself.

Once you’ve checked with your local environmental health authority for any regulations that would forbid you from keeping poultry in your residential area, and re-read the deeds of your home for the same, it’s time to start deciding what to buy and where from.

Here’s Blagger’s ‘Friday Five’ rundown of the first sites you should turn to on the road to egg and meat self-sufficiency.

SOME HENS The Battery Hen Welfare Trust (BHWT) re-homes former battery hens once they have come to the end of their productive lives. Most battery hens are slaughtered when they are less than a year old, as their rates of laying drop fractionally. They’re then made into pet food.

The Trust rescues these hens and works to re-house them with at-home farmers who want a pair or more for their garden. The hens should still be highly productive, although they may be missing a small part of their beaks, which could have been snipped off by the farmer to stop them from pecking each other. There are Trust sites around the country, allowing you to do a good deed for local abused birds wherever you live.

If you’re still not convinced that you should rescue a hen, then check out the Trust’s Gallery of Spoilt Hens to see how friendly, sociable and happy they can be in the right environment.

HEN DIRECTORY If you’d rather buy your flock brand new, then check out the extensive list of breeds at Omlet. Very few sites give both pictures and characteristic of the most common breeds, yet this extensive egg-cyclopedia does both, with aplomb. If you need to match your hens to your hydrangea, or your bantams to your bougenvelia, this makes it about as easy as picking from the Argos catalogue.

Sadly Omlet won’t deliver livestock to anywhere more than two hours’ drive from its base in Oxford, so check here, and then buy elsewhere if you don’t fall within its catchment area.

HOMES FOR HENS We’re sticking with Omlet for our third recommendation, proving that this supplier really is the home farmer’s best choice for getting started with chickens.

You probably shouldn’t be building your own chicken run. It’ll save money, but it certainly won’t save time, and unless you get it right you’re going to end up with damp, unhappy and possibly unwell birds. The easy alternative is Omlet’s funky Eglus. These easily-maintained, easily-cleaned, double-skinned homes are ideal for between two and ten hens (depending which one you buy). They’re built with the busy owner in mind, with quick-access doors for retrieving eggs and topping up the food, and the whole thing can be easily dismantled and hosed down for hygiene.

Best of all, they come with a unique anti-fox skirt that should keep your feathery ladies safe from the nightly neighbourhood prowler. They’ve got so much confidence it will keep your flock safe that they’ve even given it a guarantee.

And, as the Eglu is plastic and metal rather than live animals, Omlet will even deliver it beyond it two-hour cut-off.

CHICKEN FEED Chickens love offcuts from your kitchen vegetable prep (and they’ll ransack your plot if you let them roam free) but you shouldn’t feed them on veg alone. They need a carefully-balanced diet including grit, pellets and corn. Fortunately it’s not expensive to kit out your chicken larder, and so you should look at getting in a supply of food before buying your birds.

Suppliers like Flyte So Fancy and G J W Titmuss supply poultry feed at excellent prices. Flyte is selling 20kg bags of Organic Mixed Corn for poultry for £10.95 - a mix that it claims will ‘provide the vitamins and minerals needed in a balanced diet’. Titmuss sells the same quantity of Small Holder Free Range Layers Meal for £6.95.

HEALTHY HENS Chickens can get sick, just like the rest of us, so being on good terms with your local vet is a must. However, a lot of problems can often be sorted at home, which is where the net can help.

The Urban Chicken wiki has pages on common ailments that can afflict your flock, including lice, worms, and impacted or watery crop. It gives some simple suggestions for diagnosing and remedying problems, but even if it doesn’t put your hens back on the road to rude health, it is at least a good starting point, allowing you to talk to your vet with some authority.

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self sufficiency, self+sufficiency, self-sufficiency, chicken, poultry, keeping chickens

Inclusion in this list should not be construed as recommendation.