3 Easy Cookie Recipes Made From Pantry Staples

There is absolutely no need to pay the convenience tax at the supermarket when it comes to sweet treats. This week I filled a whole cookie jar for the price of one muffin or a fancy croissant, using nothing but pantry staples. Treacle gingernuts, hazelnut jam drops and the classic New Zealand yoyo. Here is everything you need.

What's Included

Three complete cookie recipes made entirely from things already in your cupboard, plus the three supermarket traps that quietly empty your wallet: the convenience tax, the top-up tax and the hidden waste tax. Below you will find all three recipes, the pantry staples that make them possible, and the chef tricks that lift each one above anything you could buy in a packet.

Cookie 1: Homemade Gingernuts with Fresh Ginger and Treacle

The one that finally uses the treacle. Butter, sugar and treacle melted in one pan, tipped into flour and baking soda, and that reaction between the soda and the acidic treacle is what gives you the cracked, craggy top. Fresh ginger packs a punch no ground ginger can, and you can use either or both.

Homemade Gingernuts with Fresh Ginger and Treacle - Dark, snappy and made in one pan with no mixer at all.

Cookie 2: Yoyo Biscuits (Melting Moments) with Custard Powder

If you are not in New Zealand you probably call these melting moments. Custard powder does the job cornflour usually does, but with flavour attached, and then there is the trick that makes these: toasted milk powder. Caramelised on the stove until it turns nutty, it gives them a depth you will not find in the ones in the cabinet at the cafe.

Yoyo Biscuits (Melting Moments) with Custard Powder - Melt in your mouth, sandwiched together, and far cheaper than buying them.

Cookie 3: Hazelnut Jam Drop Cookies (Thumbprint Cookies)

The jam clearer. Hazelnuts toasted in the air fryer, skins rubbed off in a tea towel, chopped fine and rolled around the outside for crunch. Then a well pressed into each one and filled with whatever jam is taking up room in your fridge door. Mine was plum and apricot from an autumn glut.

Hazelnut Jam Drop Cookies (Thumbprint Cookies) - Soft, nutty and jammy, and a genuinely good use for a jar you were never going to finish.

What You Need From the Pantry

There is no shopping list this week, which is rather the point. Everything here is the sort of thing that is already in the cupboard doing nothing.

• Flour, butter, sugar and eggs, the four things every one of these starts with
• Treacle, that jar bought for one recipe years ago
• Ground or fresh ginger, or both
• Baking soda, which the treacle needs to react with
• Custard powder, which is cornflour with flavour already in it
• Milk powder, worth having for far more than biscuits
• Icing sugar for the yoyos
• Hazelnuts, or walnuts, or whatever nut is in the back of the cupboard
• Jam, any flavour, or a spoon of chocolate spread if that is what you have
• Salt, because a pinch in anything sweet makes everything else taste more like itself

The Three Taxes You Are Paying at the Supermarket

The convenience tax. Packets of biscuits, pre-made sweet things, snacks that go in the trolley without a second thought. You are paying top dollar for something you almost certainly have the ingredients for at home. Before I filmed this I saw a news piece about supermarket sales in Australia falling away on branded crisps, biscuits and chocolate, simply because the prices have got absurd. It is the easiest forty dollars to take back out of your trolley.

The top-up tax. The shop is designed so that little things accumulate in your basket on the way round. Not one of them feels like a decision. Together they are a significant part of your bill, and you have spent the extra before you reach the till.

The hidden waste tax. You have probably got hundreds of dollars sat in your cupboard already, in cans, dry goods, half bags and jars with three spoons left. It accumulates quietly and then you go and buy more of it. These three recipes are built entirely out of exactly that kind of thing.

A Few Tips for Making It All Work

Keep your ginger in the freezer. It dries out and goes woody in the drawer within a fortnight, and nobody uses a whole knob in time. Frozen it lasts for months, and a microplane grates it straight from frozen into something fine and even with none of the stringiness.

Toast nuts in the air fryer or the oven, never a pan. A pan gives you one side more cooked than the other. Consistent heat all the way round is what gets you a proper golden roast, and seven minutes is my rule.

Rub the skins off while the hazelnuts are still warm. Tip them into a tea towel, gather it up and ruffle them hard against each other. Some will hold on regardless. That is just hazelnuts.

Toast your milk powder. This is the one that turns a good yoyo into a great one. It caramelises and goes nutty and adds a depth of flavour that no amount of extra butter will give you.

Do the mise en place first. Read the recipe, get everything out and measured before you start. It is how we work in restaurants and it is the single biggest difference between baking calmly and baking flustered.

Chill the dough properly. All three of these want time in the fridge. Warm dough spreads badly and handles worse, and twenty minutes is not a suggestion.

Swap what you have not got. Walnuts for hazelnuts. Any jam for any other jam. Molasses for treacle. These recipes are small and forgiving, and halving or doubling them works fine.

Why This Collection Works

Three completely different biscuits, and not one of them needed a shop. A snap, a melt and a soft nutty one, which between them cover just about every mood a cup of tea can be in. Making the lot of them probably saved me ten or twelve dollars against buying the equivalent packets, and across a year of buying biscuits that stops being a rounding error.

The other reason it works is that each one has a proper technique in it rather than just a list. The hot spoon for the treacle, the frozen ginger on a microplane, the toasted milk powder, the tea towel trick for hazelnut skins. Those are the things that make a homemade biscuit better than a bought one rather than merely cheaper, and once you know them they are yours for good.

And they are lovely to give away. Christmas and entertaining season come round fast, and a tin of these made by your own hands beats anything off a shelf, while having cost you almost nothing but an afternoon.

Related Pages

Savvy Suppers Club - Five dinners for under $85, which in New Zealand right now is genuinely mad.

Gingerbread Spiced Shortbread - More warm spice, in a soft buttery shortbread rather than a snap.

Chocolate Tahini Cookies - Another cookie built on a jar you already own and never finish.

Chocolate Christmas Cookies, Make Ahead Freezer Dough - One for the tin when entertaining season arrives.

Go and look in your cupboard before you next reach for a packet at the shop. There is a very good chance that everything you need for a full jar of biscuits is already sitting in there, bought and paid for. Click through to each recipe for the full method and quantities.

Enjoy!

Del x

Three cookie recipes made entirely from pantry staples, plus the three supermarket taxes quietly costing you money.