Logic would suggest — dictate, even — that balance is of foremost and utmost importance when considering a recipe’s sweetness; and I’m not here to tell you that’s falsehood and calumny. But sometimes, as Robert Frost suggested, the only way out is through, and the only way to challenge sweetness is to run at it, headlong and dauntless, with more sweetness. This madcap attitude is how I came to create, back in 2011, a pavlova covered in Smarties which was insolently exquisite and appallingly logical (and I notice deep in this ancient blog post that thirteen years later I still haven’t acted upon the notion to create a pavlova with a cream cheese-based topping but I’m writing it down in my notebook; sometimes you have to look to the past to move into the future!) This is also how I came to dip the already molasses-heavy Joe Frogger cookies into skull-achingly sweet white chocolate; and this is how I came to adapt those cookies and sandwich them together with icing to create these ginger, lemon, and brown butter kisses. Sometimes more is not simply more, it’s enough.

Do these need the icing that affixes them together? I don’t know, do you need the pants you’re wearing? The bluebird’s delicate song? Perhaps, perhaps not, but cookies really have to be governed by want first, need second, and greed, above all. I’m not entirely asking you to replace your mouthwash with sugar syrup here — there is, despite my protestations, a prevailing sense of balance. The brown butter is a paperweight holding down the flyaway sweetness of the icing sugar; the lemon juice does obvious cut-through work, but together they provide an odd discordant quality — nutty and sour, respectively — that keeps the brain alert and the senses keen.

Tying it all together is the relatively un-secret ingredient of a hearty dash of milk powder; it’s not my invention to add it to baking but it’s one I’ll happily adopt. Its presence isn’t dramatic and yet! Like highlighting and bolding text or salting a tomato, it makes everything taste richer, more intense, more of itself. Back to the cookies, though, there is a peppery quantity of dried ginger which, refracted through the throat-burning golden syrup, adds a dense, comforting sweetness, comforting because ginger speaks of longevity and warmth, it evokes baking before it even reaches the oven — though not quite as much as cinnamon can claim to — and it can withstand a lot of straight up sugar before toppling over.

With all that competing sweetness in mind, and given that they’re paired off, I’ve also made these cookies quite miniature in stature, like puffy little buttons — they’re intense, but they’re adorable.

If you’re in the mood to bake further along these lines, I might also suggest the dash and verve of my pistachio toffee cookies, my hundreds and thousands cookies, or of course, the white chocolate-dipped Joe Frogger cookies from whence came the inspiration and specs for these cookies.

Ginger, lemon, and brown butter kisses

Adorable yet intense, these miniature sandwiches are sweet and complex. If you’re American and can’t easily locate golden syrup, I would urge you to use molasses instead rather than corn syrup, which I cannot trust as a 1:1 replacement. A recipe by myself, but adapted closely from these Joe Frogger cookies.

Ginger kisses

• 120g butter
• 120g brown sugar
• 160ml (2/3 cup) golden syrup
• 2 tablespoons whole milk powder
• 1 tablespoon ground ginger
• 275g flour
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda

Lemon brown butter icing

• 40g butter
• 1 lemon
• 2 tablespoons whole milk powder
• 150g icing sugar

1: Melt the 120g butter, either in a large saucepan over a low heat, or in a heatproof bowl in short bursts in the microwave. Stir in the 120g brown sugar, 160ml golden syrup, two tablespoons of milk powder and tablespoon of ground ginger.

2: Sieve in the 275g flour and 1/4 teaspoon baking powder — nothing worse than poorly-dispersed baking soda and even in small quantites, it can do damage! — and stir to form a thick dough. Place in the refrigerator for about ten minutes while you set your oven to 190C/350F and line a flat baking tray with baking paper.

3: After the dough has chilled for ten minutes, roll heaped teaspoonfuls of it into balls and place on the paper-lined tray. It will be tempting to accidentally roll larger and larger balls of dough — because you’re sandwiching these together, try to keep them fairly consistent. Keeping them this small ensures a manageable mouthful once sandwiched, and you get more cookies out of the dough; larger and fewer is fine if that’s what you’re after though.

4: Bake the balls of cookie dough — no need to flatten — for ten minutes, then carefully transfer them to a cooling rack and repeat the baking process with the remaining dough.

5: While the cookies are cooling, get on with the icing. Heat the 40g butter in a pan steadily and persistently until it starts bubbling and turning a deep golden brown colour. Remove from the heat and scrape all of it, including any buttery sediment that has formed, into a mixing bowl. Zest the lemon and stir this into the butter, along with the two tablespoons of milk powder. Sieve in the 150g icing sugar and stir together, squeezing in enough juice from the zested lemon to form a thick, spreadable frosting. Icing sugar absorbs liquid at great haste; nevertheless I found I needed the whole lemon’s juice for this.

6: Smear a heaped teaspoonful of icing on the flat side of one of the cookies and sandwich it, flat side together, with another cookie. Repeat with the remaining icing and cookies; any lone remaining cookie can be eaten by you, spread with leftover icing, should there be any.

Store in a container at room temperature — these keep well but are at their best consumed within a week.

Makes 16-18 pairs.

Notes:

If you can’t find milk powder, I’ve made these without — not adjusting any other ingredients — and they were still delicious.

If using unsalted butter, add a half teaspoon of salt to the cookie dough and a quarter teaspoon to the icing. I always use salted butter; but even that sometimes needs a little added bump.

music lately:

What if… by Dore Soul. When a song has several rambunctious tempo changes within its walls, it’s like it was written for me specifically!

This Modern Love by Bloc Party; the urgent, overlapping vocals that come in a beat and a half earlier than you anticipate feels not unlike overhearing a conversation you’re not sure you should be privy to before realising it’s actually you talking; even the twinkliness can’t halt that anxious, overexplaining energy. Excellent.

The Devil Made Me Do It by Paris, with the same kind of intensity hitting your throat as 160ml of golden syrup and a tablespoon of ground ginger.

Jump by Lana Del Rey, can anyone with even poorer impulse control than I confirm that the bootleg vinyl recording of her debut album sounds decent, because this is one of my very favourite songs of hers and all I’ve got is this youtube video that sounds as though it was recorded over the phone and the phone was encased in a tube sock and that tube sock was swung about someone’s head like a slingshot. Would love to know!

PS: As I’ve said previously, ReliefAid’s Gaza Appeal is important to me. Their team, through perishingly difficult circumstances, are on the ground trying to help. It’s been a while since their last update at the end of May but if you’re looking for relief effort to support in Palestine, I suggest them as a starting point.