Brandy Snaps with Chantilly Cream

This easy recipe for brandy snaps with Chantilly cream shows how to make these delicate and sweet lace cookies at home.

A brandy snap is a popular treat in NZ, Australia, and the UK. They make an easy dessert to serve to a crowd of people as each brandy snap can be a single serving.

You can shape them like a tube and pipe them with cream, or like a basket and fill them with cream and fruit or lemon curd.

What is a brandy snap?

A brandy snap is a cookie made from a runny batter made of sugar, golden syrup, flour, butter, ginger, and a little lemon juice. As the cookies bake, they spread out into thin circles. The batter bubbles as it spreads and it creates a lacy pattern.

Once the brandy snap has finished baking, it’s left to slightly cool, then while still warm it’s shaped.

The cookies become brittle and hard once they cool. They are traditionally filled with cream which adds a great contrast to the crunchy snap.

Despite the name, there is no brandy in the brandy snap. The word brandy comes from ‘brand-schnap‘ where brand refers to fire, or ‘burn’.

Ingredients

Brandy snaps are made from pantry staples. You will need

• Butter – Unsalted or salted is fine. If using salted, you can omit the salt from the recipe
• Golden syrup – This helps to bring a deep toffee flavour to the brandy snap.
• Soft brown sugar – More notes of toffee
• Salt – to balance the sweet
• Flour – A general all-purpose flour brings a bit of structure
• Ground ginger – Just a little
• Lemon juice – A little acid helps the texture of the cookie

The easy thing to remember with these cookies is that they use equal weights of butter, golden syrup, sugar, and flour so you can increase and decrease the amounts to make as many brandy snaps as you need (while also adjusting the lemon and ground ginger as needed.)

Baking brandy snaps

Brandy snaps are a very delicate cookie that bakes very quickly and can burn if not kept a close watch on.

How long they take to bake really depends on your oven temperature. All ovens can vary in how hot they run so just following the oven temperature from the recipe might not work for yours.

They can bake for anywhere between 5-8 minutes, at a temperature of around 170°C/338°F regular oven. The cookies should spread out and become bubbly and deep amber brown, but you don’t want the edges burning or becoming too dark or they will be bitter.

It can be a good idea to bake just one, to begin with, to test your oven. Once you know your timings, you can bake 3-4 brandy snaps at a time. No more than that though or you won’t have time to shape them before they cool.

Shaping brandy snaps

Brandy snaps aren’t difficult to shape, but you do have to be ready. Once the cookies come from the oven they are very hot and floppy. They’ll need to cool for about a minute or two before they can be handled.

Once they’re not too hot to touch (but still pliable), wrap one around the handle of a wooden spoon to create a tube. Hold it in place for 10 seconds or so while it firms up, then slide it off.

Brandy snap baskets can be shaped by placing a hot cookie over a greased jar and pressing it down and around the jar. Hold it in place until it firms up a bit, then remove it. Don’t let it cool completely on the jar or the spoon handle or it may shatter. It’s easier to remove them while they’re still slightly warm.

If you leave them on the tray too long and they harden too much to shape, place the tray back in the oven for 30 or so seconds to warm the cookies back up.

Step-by-step instructions

• In a saucepan, measure out the butter, brown sugar, golden syrup and salt.
• Let this melt over low heat, stirring only occasionally until the brown sugar has dissolved. Don’t let the mixture boil.

• Once dissolved, remove the saucepan from the heat and let it cool for 2 minutes.
• In a small bowl, stir together the flour and ground ginger to remove any ginger lumps. Add this to the butter mixture along with the lemon juice and mix it together with a wooden spoon until combined and glossy.
• Drop spoonfuls of the batter onto parchment-lined baking trays. 1 1/2 teaspoons of batter for the tubes, and 2 1/2 teaspoons for a basket.
• Bake them for 5-8 minutes until amber brown and lacy.
• Let them cool for around 1 minute before shaping

Brandy snaps with Chantilly cream

Chantilly cream is really just the fancy term for sweetened whipped cream.

It makes the perfect filling for the brandy snaps.

The cream is only very lightly sweetened because the cookies are already very sweet so it’s nice to have a bit of a contrast. The cream can also have a little vanilla added to it for extra flavour but that’s an optional extra.

Brandy snap basket filling ideas

Chantilly cream can also be used to fill the brandy snap baskets and topped with fresh fruits.

Alternatively, the can be filled with –

• Vanilla cream pattiserrie
• Chocolate cream pattiserrie
• Lemon curd and cream
• Mascarpone, whipped ricotta or creme fraiche

Adding zesty fresh fruit to whatever filling is used helps to balance the sweetness.

Have you made these after being inspired by the British bake-off?

Here’s a great gluten-free brandy snap recipe if you can’t have gluten!

Storing brandy snaps

Unfilled brandy snaps can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days, though they will soften after day 1.

Once filled with cream they are best served within an hour as the cream will soften the cookie.

Recipe measurements

This recipe is written using grams as the measurement to keep things consistent.

Using cups can very often lead to baking mishaps as cup sizes vary depending on where you are in the world and so does how people fill their cups. For example, a US cup is 236ml while an NZ/AU cup is 250ml.

Grams are easy to measure using a kitchen scale and everything can be measured with it! It also saves on washing up all the different-sized cups you’d otherwise be using.

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