Step 1

Mix the butter + shortening with the flour. You want to ensure that there are no large pieces of butter or shortening left in the dough. It might be useful to use a dough cutter here, but you can also just do it with your finger. The dough should look slightly crumbly at the end.

Step 2

Add the (cold) water to the dough and knead the dough into a ball. All you need to do is to make a coherent ball that you can roll out, do not knead it longer than necessary.

Step 3

You can now leave the dough to rest until you're ready to use it (if that will be several hours, store it in the fridge).

Step 4

Once you're ready to fry the dough, roll the dough out into a thin sheet (about 3-4 mm thick). Roll the dough thinner than you want the final cookies to be, they at least double in thickness during baking.

Step 5

Cut the dough into long strips of about 1-1,5 cm wide. Cut the strips into shorter strands (I tend to cut them in about lengths of 5 cm, but you can definitely make them longer).

Step 6

In the meantime, heat up the oil in a wok, deep fryer or deep pan. The temperature should be about 180°C. If you don't have a thermometer, throw in a small piece of dough. It should start bubbling immediately, but take a while to turn brown.

Step 7

Fry the cookies in several batches, such that the oil doesn't drop down too much in temperature when you add fresh dough (turn up the heat to high when adding new dough and turn it down as soon as everything is in). Aim to keep the temperature between 160-180°C, the frying should take several minutes at least. The cookies will have to cook all the way through which will take a little while and should be a light brown at the end.

Step 8

You can start making the sugar syrup while frying your kurma cookies.

Step 9

Take a saucepan and add the ginger, sugar, and water. Bring the mixture to a boil. Stir through slightly to ensure all the sugar is dissolved. Once it is dissolved, do not touch the pan, just let it boil.

Step 10

If you want to test whether there is enough ginger in the syrup, now is the time. Just take a little bit and taste to see if there's enough ginger flavor here. Keep in mind that it will still concentrate slightly.

Step 11

Continue cooking the syrup until it is 112-113°C (233-235°F).

Step 12

Once it has reached its target temperature, immediately take it off the heat and pour it over the cookies**. It's best to stir through the cookies while pouring to ensure all the cookies get covered with syrup. Now continue stirring the cookies until the sugar starts to crystallize and turn whitish (optionally add the icing sugar to help kickstart the sugar crystallization).

Step 13

Leave to cool down. The sugar will turn hard and some cookies might be stuck together, just loosen them gently. Enjoy!