Ginger Crunch

New Zealand’s ginger crunch is a biscuit-like base with ginger worked into it, topped with a ginger icing. It is also a slice—a sweet cut into pieces—in which the same aroma runs through both layers while two different textures can be enjoyed: the crumbly bite of the base and the smoothness of the icing.

Because it is baked as a single sheet in a tray and cut into squares at the end, it is not a sweet shaped piece by piece; the shape of each piece is decided at the cutting stage.

Ginger crunch with ginger icing over a pale base. Photo: DrThneed, 2020, location unknown. CC BY-SA 4.0, unmodified.

A crumbly base and ginger icing

The base is made by creaming softened butter and sugar, then adding flour, baking powder and ground ginger. Even though it resembles crumbs once mixed, it becomes a single base when pressed into the tin.

The aim here is not a tall, risen, cake-like dough. It is baked to bring out the toasty flavor and bite of the flour and butter.

The icing on top is made by warming butter, icing sugar, golden syrup and ground ginger until smooth. Both the icing that touches the mouth first and the base that crumbles when bitten carry the aroma of ginger.

As it cools, the icing settles into an even surface and hides the fine browning of the base. Even so, the cut edge still shows the boundary between the baked layer and the layer added afterward.

Pour it on hot, or spread it once cooled

The current Edmonds recipe pours hot icing onto the hot base, scores it right away and leaves it to cool. While warm, the icing spreads easily, and the square outlines can be set before the base has fully hardened.

By contrast, the recipe published in the New Zealand Listener on August 22, 1952, cuts the base while it is still warm and spreads the icing once it has cooled. Although the composition is similar—no eggs, a ginger-flavored base, and an icing of icing sugar, butter, golden syrup and ginger—the temperatures at which it is handled and the order of cutting are not the same.

The recipe that pastry chef David Lebovitz received from a New Zealand reader is also a combination of firm shortbread and icing. The thickness of the icing varies from recipe to recipe, but its defining feature is biting into the toasty, crumbly base below together with the smooth icing on top.

Ginger slice on display at a shop in Dunedin on New Zealand’s South Island. The boundary between the thick icing and the baked base is visible in the cut edge. Photo: Daderot, 2024-10-24, Dunedin, New Zealand. Original image / CC0. Downscaled version from the source; no further modifications.

Recipe exchange between households recorded in a 1952 magazine

The 1952 Listener shows this two-layer sweet as it had already spread among households. The writer of the column noted that when a recipe arrived from Invercargill in the south as a “new discovery,” similar ones would arrive from the north, east and west within a few days, and gave ginger crunch as an example.

This contemporary record conveys how recipes passed from household to household, sometimes changing their names along the way. Cutting a single sheet into small pieces also suited the way it was used at the time, served with tea or added to packed lunches.

Ginger crunch for sale at a café in Auckland. Photo: Prosperosity, 2023. CC BY 4.0, unmodified.

No-bake ginger slice

Among sweets topped with ginger icing, there is also a closely related form whose base is not baked in the oven. In one example of a New Zealand home recipe, crushed biscuits are mixed with warmed butter, brown sugar, ground ginger and sweetened condensed milk, pressed into a tin and chilled. Ginger icing is spread over the chilled base, and it is chilled again before cutting.

Unlike a base baked from flour, this version uses biscuits that have already been baked, so the two layers can be assembled without using an oven.

Versions with oats, ginger and hokey pokey

In a recipe by contributor Vanessa, published by the sugar manufacturer Chelsea, the base and icing are topped with a separately toasted oat and coconut crumble and finished with a thin drizzle of dark chocolate. The light cereal pieces add a different kind of crumble from that of the baked base.

In a recipe by contributor Annabel, also from Chelsea, oats, coconut and crystallized ginger are mixed into the base itself, and the top is decorated with hokey pokey, an aerated sugar candy. The icing uses not only ground ginger but also freshly grated ginger.

Using ground, fresh and crystallized ginger, and adding a candy that can be crunched, gives the two-layer sweet an even wider range of textures.

Glossary