Cherry Wink Cookies

Just before Christmas amidst my usual pre-Christmas baking flurry I promised to give you some recipes for the massive pile of biscuits I made. There is nothing especially Christmas-y about these except that they have a bright, red glace cherry on top, and for some reason I associate glace cherries with Christmas. And with gobbling down ice cream on a hot summer's evening (in summer on special occasions mum would make us an ice cream cone with (usually) vanilla ice cream and a glace cherry on top. There's nothing quite like licking your way around the cherry and then trying to push it down into the ice cream with your tongue so it won't fall off. And then of course you get a frostbitten tongue, but who cares?? You're eating ice cream!).

 

This one is from Margaret Fulton's Baking. I got this book for my 30th birthday from Kirsti. So far I have had two excellent biscuit-making experiences from it, and one really bad cake-making experience. At this point I'm inclined to blame the oven I used but I'm going to have to try and make that cake again to figure it out. And then give the cake away immediately that I have taste-tested one slice, because although it was a disaster I still ate more of it than I ought to have!

 

To the biscuits! (or, cookies for the American readers)

 

INGREDIENTS:

1.5c (225g) plain flour

2tsp baking powder

Pinch salt

125g butter, softened

0.5c (110g) castor sugar

1.5tsp vanilla

2tbsp honey

1 egg

2tbsp milk

2c corn flakes, lightly crushed

0.5c glace cherries, halved.

 

METHOD:

Preheat oven to 200oC. Line tray with baking paper.

 

Sift flour, baking powder and salt together.

 

Cream butter, sugar and vanilla, then add in the honey and egg and beat until combined.

 

Mix in sifted flour mixture alternately with milk until of an even consistency.

 

Roll tablespoons of the dough in the crushed cornflakes and place on tray. Gently press a glace cherry on top.

 

Bake for around 10 minutes, or until golden.

 

Eat 12,086,473,493 of them because you enjoy the subtle honey taste and the light crunch of the corn flakes so much!

Sorry that this is the only picture I have of them - I had a spectacular one on my iPhone of them all cooling on racks, row upon row, but my phone died two Sundays ago and took with it to its grave a lot of photos that I am quite sad to lose :( I still haven't even figured out if I will get my music back (although I'm sure that given I bought most of it from iTunes, straight to my phone, there must be a record of me having purchased it). There's a valuable lesson in that - back up your iPhone!

Lastly, an Australian tablespoon (tbsp) is traditionally 20mL where the rest of the world satisfies itself with a mere 15mL. So if you're using an American or British tablespoon and the mixture seems a little dry, it's probably because it's missing 10mL of milk and 5mL of honey.

 

Christmas Baking: The Sneak-Peek!

Howdy!

 

It's been a crazy, crazy week. That's the nature of the couple of weeks pre-Christmas, and this time around I squeezed five Christmas-related meals in between Tuesday and Saturday evening *pats food baby* On top of that, I was at work at 6:30am every day, spent about twelve hours there, and spent two of those days outside in 35-40oC heat. Suffice it to say that, come Friday, I was a little tiny bit exhausted.

 

But, being pre-Christmas, I had baking planned for my Friday night (plus making a salad for Saturday's Christmas lunch, which I will hopefully get around to posting before Christmas - it's a broccoli salad, and a surprisingly tasty one. Probably not much good for the Christmas dinner table for those in the Northern hemisphere, but for us Down Under it would go down well). The baking plan kind of failed when the supermarket neglected to deliver a couple of key items, and I ended up driving up to the supermarket to get them. D'oh! So I only ended up making the salad on Friday night, and it wasn't until I got home at 9pm Saturday night that I began my baking. 220-ish biscuits in four hours ain't bad!

 

Because I'm so wrecked and need to be in bed within ten minutes, I'll post the easy one. It's easy because I've made them before - it's the recipe for Margaret Fulton's Christmas Spice Biscuits that I made for my cousin's engagement party.

 

This time, instead of making pretty snowflakes and stencilling royal icing onto them, I made Christmas trees and piped royal icing on and glued some bits and pieces on instead. I used Heather's recipe for royal icing from her Sprinkle Bakes book (and I have to say, I don't think I've seen "stiff peak", "soft peak" and "flood" icing described so well before, so I recommend the book if only for that!). 

 

It's more or less as I remember mum teaching me - two egg whites, a little lemon juice (2 tsp in this case), 3c sifted icing sugar (NOT soft icing mixture) plus half a teaspoon of whatever essence you want to use (I used peppermint this time). Once I had beated the heck out of it on low speed and achieved stiff peak icing (it stands up on its own) I then took half a silicone spatula's worth out (hah! What a detailed measurement!), dolloped it in a small bowl, coloured it using gel colour then added a single drop of water using a dropper, stirred it around and tested it (the peak now flopped over on itself) I imagine if you're using liquid colour you should DEFINITELY add it before the water because it may, in itself, water the mixture down... but as I said, that's what I imagine! Check your facts first, because it's a lot easier to water royal icing down than it is to thicken it up again.

 

This is me piping, and obviously getting distracted by having to take a photo with a DSLR with my left hand - note the big blob of icing coming out!

 

This is what I call Piping Grip - it's how I choose to hold the piping bag, and works well for me. You cradle the twisted part of the bag between your thumb and index finger and apply pressure with the remaining fingers. I've also been taught another way - use your two little fingers to keep the bag twisted, then rest the fat end of the piping bag in your palm - but I feel like I have more control this way.

 

60-something biscuits, plus the mixing bowl soaking my red piping tip (note the pink water!).

 

And now I've made them pretty, with cachous (mind your teeth!) and candy-cane shaped sprinkles (which actually taste like peppermint) which I seem to recall I got from Baking Pleasures (although they don't appear to be in stock at present, which is kind of a moot point anyway because they're closed for Christmas!)

 

I can't decide which I like better - the red

 

or the green?

 

I think the green ones are more appropriate, but the red have more of a visual impact when you're presenting them. Plus I seem to recall reading that "cool" colours and neutrals dull the appetite, whereas brightly-coloured foods stimulate it. Not that anyone is likely to be dissuaded from eating a biscuit based on the colour of its icing!

 

 

Stay tuned for recipes for the other biscuits in this box. The boys at work ain't gonna know what hit them!

 

Christmas In July. Sort Of!

I made these cute biscuits on the weekend as a practice run for 80-odd I'll be making for my cousin's engagement party. I'm none too confident with biscuits but - whether it was because I was paying especial care, or it was just a great recipe - these are a winner. Think gingerbread with no ginger - spicy and more chewy than crunchy. I did a half batch and got about twenty out of it using two largish snowflake cutters. We shan't discuss how many there would have been if I hadn't picked at the straggly bits of cookie dough as I cut the biscuits out...

CHRISTMAS SPICE BISCUITS - Margaret Fulton's "Baking"

2 2/3c (400g) SR flour
Pinch of salt
1 1/2tsp each of ground cinnamon, ground cloves and ground nutmeg
1tsp ground white pepper (I used black pepper with no apparent ill effects)
1/2c (110g) each of castor sugar and firmly packed brown sugar
250g butter, diced
1/3c milk
1/4tsp bicarbonate of soda
Decorating stuff (I used royal icing, silver cachous and disco dust, plus a snowflake stencil

Oven at 180oC. Line trays with baking paper (I used 2 trays for a half batch)

Sift everything as far as the sugars into a large bowl. Add butter and rub in until resembles breadcrumbs (or be lazy like me and dump the whole lot in a food processor to do most of the work then finish it off by hand).

Combine milk and bicarb in a cup and stir into flour mixture (I used a butter knife to get it started). Knead lightly to form a firm but elastic dough (I kept going until it stuck together properly and could roll a ball with it. Wouldn't say it was an especially light knead but it came out okay). Halve dough, wrap in Glad wrap and refrigerate 30mins.

Roll out dough (leave other bit in fridge) to about 4mm and cut with cutters of choice. Re-knead dough scraps and re chill before rolling out again.

Bake 15-20mins or until golden. Keep an eye on them as they will catch quickly. You may need to rotate pans. Decorate as desired (recipe suggests a dusting of icing sugar.

Gluten Free Tropical Sunset Yo-Yos

I know, that's a long-winded name for this recipe but I felt like it. It's based on a recipe for passionfruit yo-yos (or, as some other states call them, melting moments *snorts with derision*), which is in AWW's Cook (wow, I just realised it costs half now what it did when it was bought for me about five years ago).

I basically did a straightforward switcheroonie of plain flour for plain GF flour and didn't add any xanthan gum (possibly a mistake). I think perhaps I was lucky that it was a warm day and I was having trouble rolling the biscuits into balls (the dough kept sticking to my hands), because otherwise I probably wouldn't have made them in 2 batches and treated the second batch differently, and so the entire thing would have been a screaming failure. The GF recipe is a lot more delicate than the original.

For my colour selection, I was initially inspired by the bright colours of the Great Macaron Craze of 2010 (the period of time when everyone decided baking was cool again and their heads exploded in an effort to learn to bake macarons. Don't ask me why - they're not biscuits and they're not meringues and I prefer both of those things to a macaron! Or perhaps I have just never had a good macaron...). I also love things that look like those retro hand-coloured, Technicolor pictures in old AWW cookbooks. They're wonderful. And who doesn't like pink! And orange! And the fact they had passionfruit in them made me think of tropical sunsets, thus the name.

Something I didn't expect was that the GF version of this recipe tastes a lot more buttery than the normal version of the recipe (although, as I edit this, I'm wondering whether I used a different recipe to the first time I baked them...). I can't explain why, but next time I will certainly be playing with a few more things to improve the recipe and the flavour - perhaps I will add some lemon peel to the dough and some sort of flavouring to the buttercream. In the meantime, here is my "it-kind-of-works-but-it-could-be-better" GF recipe!

INGREDIENTS FOR YO-YOS:

250g butter

1/2c icing sugar

1tsp vanilla extract

1-2 drops red gel food colouring (I used Americolour Red Red)

1+1/2c plain GF flour

1/2c non-glutinous cornflour

Beat butter and sugar.

Bemoan the fact that it seems a bit weird to dip your finger into the butter-sugar mix when the sugar is basically non-existent and not at all delcious and grainy :(

Add egg and vanilla and a drop of food colouring and mix well.

Add flour and beat until combined. Add another drop of colouring if it seems necessary.

This part is really important!

Refrigerate dough until firm (at least half an hour).

Meanwhile, preheat oven to 170oC and line 2 baking trays with baking paper.

Roll into balls 2-3cm across (a super-heaped tsp or a scant tbsp) and place on trays, 3cm apart. They don't spread a great deal but they do spread more than normal yo-yos, so you may wish to use a third tray to be sure that they won't all stick to each other.

Lightly squash balls with a (GF) floured fork.

This part is really important!

Put squashed balls (hehe) on tray in the freezer for about 10-15 minutes to firm them up.

Bake for 12 mins. Leave on tray 5mins then transfer to cooling rack

PASSIONFRUIT BUTTERCREAM:

1tbsp passionfruit pulp

80g butter

2 drops orange gel food colour (I used Americolour Orange)

2/3c icing sugar, sifted.

Beat butter until light and fluffy. Add food colour and beat until mixed in and colour is even. Add icing sugar and beat until combined. Add passionfruit and beat until combined. Avoid the urge to refrigerate the buttercream because if it's too hard it will be difficult to spread. Don't worry, refrigeration will come later.

Now this is where it gets a bit tricky, and you may find yourself concentrating so hard that your tongue comes out the corner of your mouth, like when you were a kid and you were trying really hard to cut something complicated out using scissors.

Once the biscuits are cool you need to fill them. Before you touch them, you need to be aware that the biscuits (especially when they are still warm) will literally explode in your hand if you exert too much force. How much force is too much, you ask? Um, not very much at all. I'm talking, you need to use a spatula to transfer them to the cooling rack otherwise you'll put your finger through it.

It follows that when you are filling the biscuits you need to give them as much support as possible. This means cupping it in your hand and verrrry gently spreading the buttercream on. Next, you top it with a second biscuit and verrry gently push it whilst twisting downwards to make it stick, about 1/4 of a turn. Try to push with 3 fingers flat or the palm of your other hand rather than 2 fingers - it means it is less likely to explode!

This part is really important!

Once they are all filled, pop them in the fridge until they are set. Once the buttercream has soaked into the biscuit a little and the cool has set them they are a LOT more stable. Serve straight out of the fridge. I don't recommend leaving them on the bench for more than about half an hour or so otherwise you'll be back to square one. Ten to fifteen minutes is probably ideal as they'll still be firm but not so cold as to retard the passionfruit flavour.

Here they are, all pretty! Note the evidence of exploded biscuits in the background :(

Things I will play with next time: addition of xanthan gum; addition of a small amount of lemon peel to the biscuit; addition of some passionfruit/other tropical flavouring to the buttercream; playing with refrigeration times; refrigerating the biscuit before squashing and also before adding the filling; and maybe adding a little more flour as it is quite a wet dough.

Raspberry and White Chocolate Biscuits

One of the benefits of cleaning your house out is that you need to use up what’s left in the fridge/freezer/cupboards, or, at least, the perishables. So, following my batch of Raspberry Spiked Chocolate Brownies, I had some raspberries left over. I also discovered that I had a whole bag of really manky, heat-effected white chocolate chips. Unfortunately, as I discovered, manky white chocolate doesn’t recover its tastiness quite as well as manky dark or milk chocolate when baked so it came out kind of chalky. It still tasted okay, but I recommend using new choc chips!

I used a basic recipe for Whatever Biscuits that I remember by calling it “half, half, one, one, one”. Which is actually totally inaccurate, it’s just a way of remembering it, same as I remember how to make pavlova (4-1-1-1, which, conversely, actually IS completely accurate). I turned one of the “one”s into “slightly bigger than a half, x2” and added some vanilla, which I guess could be another “one” because it was probably about one teaspoon, but may also be a “half” because I guess I didn’t put that much into it, so maybe it was half a teaspoon? Of course, the first half isn’t actually a half, either – it’s slightly less than a half. And if you’re American, I’m pretty sure you’d call it “One, half, one, one, one” because that first half is a little less than half an Australian block of butter, which I **think** equates to about one American “stick”. But I’m not American. I’m also rambling. I think what I’m trying to say is that it’s a fairly flexible recipe, and that if you’re Rain Man enough you can find a pattern in anything!

INGREDIENTS:

110g butter, cubed. Helps if it’s soft. (half #1 = half an Australian block of butter)

½c sugar (half #2)

1 egg (one #1)

Vanilla to taste (new, mystery entity that could be either a half or a one, depending on your taste)

1c SR flour (one #2)

½c + a bit of white chocolate chips (combined with the raspberries is one #3)

½c + a bit of frozen raspberries (I think having them frozen helps so that they disintegrate into little balls not mush)

METHOD:

1. Preheat oven to 180oC (the magic number for most baked goods! That said, I would probably consider turning it down a bit next time because of the sugar in the raspberries)

2. Line 2 trays with baking paper

3. Beat butter and sugar until smooth/creamy/pale

4. Add egg and beat until combined

5. Add vanilla to taste

6. Add flour; mix well

7. Add choc chips; mix well

8. Add raspberries; mix well but try not to completely crush them into oblivion. You want some pieces in there, not just a pink biscuit dough

9. Roll into tablespoon-sized balls and bake for 12 minutes or so. Keep an eye on them because the raspberry component seems to like to catch

10. Cool for a minute or two and then transfer onto a cooling rack

11. Test-eat all the ugly ones whilst watching Gilmore Girls in your pyjamas

13. If you’re not happy with them, give them another run in the oven

14. Test-eat one more, just to be sure

12. Share them with friends

Now, I found these to be a little on the soft side – not at all a crunchy biscuit – so it you’re feeling especially coordinated you could maybe add a little more flour to compensate for the juiciness of the berries (and the ice crystals stuck to them – so maybe the trick is NOT to use old frozen raspberries!). I am aware it’s common to dust berries with flour prior to adding them to cake batters to stop them sinking so much, so maybe that’s the sort of quantity of flour we’re talking about here.

In the end, the following morning (before I brought them to someone’s house for morning tea – I am incapable of not fiddling with food if I don’t think it’s quite right and someone else will eat it), I whacked them in the oven for about another 6-8 minutes at about 180oC (and at some point I turned it up higher, because we know what an impatient and imprecise cook I am). I watched them VERY closely this time to make sure they didn’t catch. They seemed to brown on top more than the bottom this time around. I guess some of the moisture had evaporated from them overnight or something.

Anyway, here they are!

Do you like the plate, by the way?

I had a sudden stroke of genius the other day when I saw this on sale. I realised how hard it is to take photos of biscuits on glossy white plates, and also kind of boring, so I found a few of different colours and patterns in various bargain bins. This one set me back – wait for it – a dollar. And from a really expensive store that sells only Waterford and Villeroy & Boch and Royal Albert the like, too. Bargain! Don’t ask me what brand it is, though. Don’t get me wrong, white plates look great with some foods. Anything involving Bok Choy looks spectacular on a white plate – I think it’s the crisp white and the crisp green that does it. Biscuits? Not so much. Not to me, anyhow.

If the white background has you puzzled, it’s a piece of tissue paper (from the purchase of this plate) draped over my clotheshorse near the only window that gets good natural light. There were some better photos of the biscuits, but that was before I added the tissue paper, so the plate is basically sitting on top of towels, underwear and socks that were drying, and I didn’t think you really needed to see that when you’re supposed to be focussing on the biscuits!

Also, about a week earlier I made a variation of these but with dark chocolate and pecans, both chopped. I ate them before I remembered I was supposed to take a photo of them. And some of them were GIGANTIC biscuits (but not quite as gigantic as the ones me and my BFF Alice used to make as teenagers. Or as phallic. Giggle. Yep, we used to make phallic choc-chip biscuits, and also giant ones, and then we’d eat them with giant glasses of milk. It was one of the many things that cemented our friendship J Hi, Alice! *waves* Um, sorry if you didn’t want the entire universe to know about that!).

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, those dark choc and pecan ones were soooo gigantic and soooo tasty... *has a sudden epiphany as to why I gained weight last week* Oh, and I didn’t mention in the above recipe that I was using unsalted butter because it’s all I had left, and added salt to compensate, so I don’t know whether you may want to add some salt to your mix. Up to you. Do what feels right. Same went for the dark chocolate/pecan combination, which I suspect could probably benefit from a pinch of salt.

Damnit, now I want biscuits!

Donna Hay's Raspberry-Spiked Chocolate Brownies

Oh boy, oh boy, oh BOY, these are scrum-diddily-umptious! Diddily.

Assuming you like rasperries.

If you don't, you'll probably hate them.

But that's not really my problem. More brownies for me!

I made Donna's Raspberry-Spiked Chocolate Brownies for my friend Jody's kitchen tea, along with those Short-Black Cupcakes I posted out a few posts back (I'm having connection dramas so I won't give you the link but you can probably find it yourself if you click on Recipe on the word cloud in the side bar). I've made them before with the same results but I never bloody learn. See notes below.

Oh, FYI, I refer to her simply as "Donna", cos we're, like, totz BFFs. Totz.

Again, the recipe is out of Chocolate from her Simple Essentials range, available for purchase here (see disclaimer below).

200g dark chocolate, chopped

250g butter <-- always onto a winner when your baked good contains a whole block of butter :)

1 3/4c brown sugar

4 eggs

1 1/3c plain flour

1/4tsp baking powder

1/3c cocoa powder, sifted

1 1/2c raspberries, fresh or frozen

Preheat oven to 180oC. Melt chocolate and butter over low heat and stir until smooth (note that this is where I diverged from the instructions to save some washing up, but I don't think it made a great deal of difference). Remove from the heat and add the sugar and stir. Then add the eggs and stir quickly as you add each one (I made the assumption that the saucepan may cause the chocolate mixture to retain heat and therefore cook the eggs on impact, so I wanted to make sure I didn't have big fat chunks of cooked egg in my mixture!). Sift the flour, baking powder and cocoa and mix.

Pour into a 23cm, greased and lined square cake tin (line it a fair way up the sides so you can pull the brownie out using the baking paper once it's done and plop it on the cooling rack). Top with raspberries and bake for 45 minutes or until set. Brownies should be very fudgy in the middle.

Note that this final instruction is somewhat misleading. It never **really** sets, and my definition of "fudgy" is more like "moist mud cake; lot of crumbs and a little batter may stick to the skewer when you test it", whereas in this instance I think it means "thick cake batter".

Foolishly, I made the mistake of leaving it in the oven to cool while I ran off to the movies, and as a result the edges dried out and charred a little. This meant that I had to cut the outsides off and lost at least 1/4 of each brownie, if not more.

The instructions stop after the notes on the texture, but I think that you would ideally let it cool in the tin for 5-10 minutes to keep some moisture in the outer edges, and then lift it onto a cooling rack. I also found that refrigerating them overnight kind of made them set a bit better.

They're very sweet and rich and fudgy, but the raspberries really set that off. I love foods that feature two competing flavours like this. Definitely a winner!

Note that if there is no photo of the brownies then this means that I have been unable to transfer the photo from my phone to my laptop before the scheduled post date. Or that I have in fact gotten my laptop back from the Laptop Doctor but I've been too lazy forgotten to upload the photo. If there is a photo, please don't judge it. It's a bad photo. But a very tasty brownie. C'mon people, you all know what brownies look like!

Disclaimer: Donna Hay (or Donna, as I like to call her) has no idea that I exist. I like to link to her personal website's shopping section to prevent her from suing my butt off for publishing her recipes without her permission. I'm not sure how Copyright works but I like to think this helps, somehow...

Monkeyface biscuits

Last weekend in Adelaide I had quite the cooking weekend, knocking three items off my 101 Things list. This is one of them - monkeyface biscuits. If you're not familiar with the monkeyface, it is basically a simple jam biscuit with three holes, one for each eye and one for the mouth, the most basic icing imaginable, and finished with toasted coconut. Yum. It's funny, though - when I Googled the recipe with this particular challenge in mind, I kept coming up with all sorts of bizarre combinations involving crushed Flake chocolate bars, and none involving coconut. I'm wondering whether it's an Australian thing, and I'm also wondering whether it's one of those recipes that everyone kind of takes for granted because it's a bit of a no-brainer.

It involves making a basic biscuit recipe, adding jam and sandwiching the biscuits together and then whacking them back in the oven for a little under ten minutes to help the jam set, and then icing and dipping them in toasted coconut. They're a little bit fiddly to assemble but altogether I would still rate them as a simple recipe.

This bias may be in part related to the fact that the other two recipes I tackled last weekend were lemon tart, and gnocchi. As in, from scratch.

INGREDIENTS:

110g butter, softened

1/2c castor sugar

1 egg

1/2 tsp vanilla

3/4 plain flour

3/4 self raising flour

Raspberry jam (allow approx. 1-2tsp per biscuit. Smoosh it around in the jar with a spoon so that there are no lumps. No doubt the more sophisticated bakers out there would heat and strain it, but I happen to think that's a colossal wank waste of time unless you're sticking sugarpaste to a cake, in which case it's important not to have lumps)

1c icing sugar, sifted

1tbsp (+a little extra) boiling water (it will depend on how spreadable you want your icing)

1/2c shredded coconut, lightly toasted (you can do this in a nonstick pan but be aware that it needs constant attention and continues to cook after you take it off the heat. I originally toasted a whole cup and had heaps left over, so I'm estimating that half a cup should suffice. Don't kill me if I'm wrong!)

Do the usual biscuit thing - cream butter and sugar, add egg and vanilla and combine, then add flour.

If you're not the sort of person to stock SR flour in the house and rely instead on baking powder and plain flour, swear loudly when you realise that you have none left and the shops are shut because you're in Adelaide not Melbourne...

... then breathe a sigh of relief when you realise you have the ingredients to make your own baking powder! I seem to recall that baking powder = 1 part bicarb soda to 2 parts cream of tartar.

You then have to go a bit silly over the super-cute tin of biscuit cutters you bought that day for the purpose. True monkeyfaces, after all, have a fluted edge, and you can't very well use the plain round cutters you already have.

And if you're smart, like me, you'll get more bang for your buck and buy a nested set, in a super-cute tin, that also happens to be double edged. I just kept kicking goals all around there, didn't I :)

Knead the dough on a lightly floured bench until it's smooth and sticks together, and then roll out using a floured rolling pin and cut using floured cutters. I experimented a bit with the sizes to get the most bang for my buck with the dough. I was a bit disappointed by the number the recipe made but I guess if you make them a bit smaller it's no biggie (hah! Oh, you know what I mean. Obviously if they're smaller they're not big. I meant that it's no big deal, as in, not a problem. But you got that, right? Yeah, you're right, I do need to go to bed...).

Once you've cut them out, use the end of a wooden spoon handle to make the eyes and mouth in half of the biscuits (make sure that if you're making different sizes, that you have pairs consisting of one intact biscuit and one with facial features, both of the same size). You may need to scrape the cavities you make out a little using a sharp knife once they're cooked (sounds feral to be scraping out the eyes of a poor innocent monkey, but you'll see what I mean!).

Cook on tray lined with baking paper for 8-10 minutes at 160oC, cool on tray for a minute or two and then transfer to a rack. This is how many this recipe made. The largest one was quite big and the smallest one was about the size of a "normal" biscuit, perhaps slightly larger. See what I mean about the eyes? It's like they've been punching on...

Spread jam in the middle, sandwich together (bottom sides facing in) and pop back in the oven at 200oC for about another 8 minutes (mind they don't catch) to heat the jam a little and help it to set. Let them cool on the rack completely before decorating.

Make up the icing (note that the above quantities will probably make about double what you need, but better to have too much than too little). You may need to play with the consistency a little but you don't want it to be too thick or too thin. I used 1tbsp of boiling water and that was a little stiff, so I added a tiny splash more and it was fine. Spread it in a "peace sign" shape around the eyes and mouth with a pallet knife, being careful not to use too much icing otherwise it gets in the eyes and you have to clean it out with a knife again, and now that it contains jam that just seems wrong.... and then you dip it in the coconut while it's still wet and then leave on a wire rack to dry.

Voila!

Boozy Sultana-Choc Chip Biscuits

I'll make this one short and sweet for you, just like the biscuits!

125g softened butter

1/2c sugar

1 egg

1c SR flour

1/2c sultanas/raisins/currents/mixture, soaked in 2-3tbsp of rum (the actual quantity was a couple of "sloshes" out of the bottle)

1/2c dark chocolate chips

Pour rum over sultanas and leave to sit (should sit for a while, and you should stir occasionally if possible - when you're making Christmas cake you're supposed to leave the brandy to soak into the fruit overnight - but we all know how patient I am!).

Preheat oven to 180oC.

Cream butter and sugar, add egg, beat well.

Add sifted flour and mix into a smooth dough.

Drain sultanas (if there is any residual rum) and mix them into the dough along with the chocolate chips.

Roll into 24 or so walnut-sized balls and place on 2 trays lined with baking paper, evenly spaced.

Bake for about 12 minutes or until lightly browned - watch the bottom of the biscuits as they catch quite easily.

Enjoy!

(This is the last one, by the way, otherwise the photo would have been of an artistically-piled stack of biscuits on a pretty plate instead of a lone biscuit in my hand, headed for my mouth. The others could not evade their fate for long enough for me to remember to obtain photographic evidence of them... oops... And NO, I DID NOT eat an entire batch of biscuits on my own!!! I sent at least 16 of them away with Grant. So I only ate about 1/3 of a batch of biscuits on my own. So there.)

Next time I'll soak the sultanas for longer. Also, I'll make sure I acually buy sultanas, instead of having to pick all the peel out of a packet of mixed fruit. Yes, I really did that. I was in the throes of baking before I realised. Also, I intended to soak the sultanas in dark rum, but discovered that the only dark rum in the house was Grant's top-shelf stuff, so I assumed he wouldn't appreciate me using it in cooking and instead opted for the cheap n nasty $8 Kmart Special white rum left behind by some random partygoer.

Chocolate Chip Cookies with an Old Friend

As I am certain I have mentioned before, for some reason that I can't quite fathom, Blogger delights in un-rotating photographs that I have carefully rotated and saved as such. I don't understand why it does it but it annoys the crap out of me! So I'm afraid you'll just have to bear with my occasionally-sideways photographs (and in the meantime, I make an effort to take all photos landscape-style).

The first thing I wish to share is the cookbook stand that I received as a belated Christmas gift from my dear ol' dad. I have ruined a squillion or so cookbooks by splashing food on them as I cooked, and I am hoping that this will prevent further desecration of my collective Bibles (sorry, that was a bit sacreligious. Hopefuly the Christians of various denominations amongst you will not begrudge the analogy, given how I feel about food!).

*looks at belly*

*sighs*

And this is what it looks like from the side. See the nice pretty Perspex cover? Yeah, that's to stop me from being such a grubalub. And the stand is fairly thick, so it should allow my fatter books to fit.

What you see in the stand at present is all-round blogging champion Pioneer Woman's book, Black Heels to Tractor Wheels, which is essentially a love story, and is an account of how she and her husband came to be married. When I read the blog version it gave me hope that true love existed, and whaddaya know - a little while later I stumbled across it. Thanks for restoring my faith, P-Dub! In the back are several of her favourite recipes, which I appreciated beyond measure because all my cookbooks were in Adelaide and I was in Melbourne. I miss my cookbooks :(

So! On to the recipe. I'm not going to bother writing it out because you can find it here, where it was published by its rightful owner. I made it sans the flax seed.

The first thing that I did was get a whole lot of butter, as you should for all good biscuit recipes. Did you hear those angels singing??

You add sugar and cream it until it looks like this.

 

We all know where that mixture is headed, don't we... yep, straight into my mouth. What I'd really like to know, though, is why it's okay to eat it at the above stage, but not this one, with the eggs added (as has featured in many of my posts, it looks a little bit like spew):

...and then suddenly, with the addition of flour and choc chips, it's okay to eat it again!

THE SPEW IS STILL THERE, PEOPLE!!! IT'S JUST BEING MASKED BY FLOUR AND

CHOCOLATE!!! And it tastes sooooooo good... *drools*



You see the finished product there with a glass of milk each for myself and my good friend Al. I made the biscuits to send Grant, and Al happened to pop around that afternoon (Hi, Al! *waves* It was great catching up with you!), and there were surplus biscuits to be dealt with. Al took one for the team and helped me out. He's good like that.

The only thing I would say about this recipe is that it has quite a lot of salt in it. Maybe Australian chocolate isn't as sweet as American chocolate and therefore the flavour balance isn't required, but I wouldn't put more than half the specified amount of salt in. I'd probably also put a little bit less coffee powder. Coffee is quite a common ingredient for dense chocolate cakes and some chocolate biscuits, but I'd use less of it. That's just my personal taste. Then again, maybe with less salt the coffee would also seem less overwhelming... have a play!

Afternoon Tea With the Girls, Part Two: Dutch Ginger Biscuits, or, How Cookbooks Sometimes Get Things Really Wrong

So, back to the afternoon tea with the Adelaide girls.

As I said in a previous post, I wanted to make something for which I already had the ingredients. I like to build up an arsenal of these sorts of recipes so that I know what I can whip up out of what's in the cupboard at any given moment in time.

This one, from the CWA/Weekly Times "Country Classics" seemed easy. In fact, it seemed a little bit too easy, ifyaknowwhatImean.

(What I mean is that it seemed like there was something missing. I realise that the use of the word "easy" followed by "ifyaknowwhatImean" might give some people - you know exactly who you are! - the wrong idea!!!)

So.

The recipe called for:

1 3/4c plain flour, sifted

3/4c castor sugar

125g glace ginger (I went with crystalised because it was what I had)

1 egg, beaten

1 egg, beaten, extra.

I preheated the oven to 170o (actually, 150o because it's Fan Forced), like it said.

I greased and lined a 20cm x 25cm tin (which I take to be a lamington or slice tin), like it said.

I mixed all the ingredients together (except the extra egg, which you brush over once you've pressed it into the tin and before baking), like it said.

Or, more to the point, I tried to, but they just wouldn't stick!

At around this point it became abundantly apparent that there was something rather amiss with the recipe.

(Don't mind the green paint on my wrist band - a can of spraypaint with a faulty nozzle more or less exploded all over my hands and arms and clothes at work a couple of weeks ago, and that's all that's left of the damage. That, and my shirt and my pants and my boots and my belt and my GPS and my ring (don't worry, NOT my engagement ring!), all with blotches of green paint on them)

So anyway, I took a wild stab in the dark and chucked in half a block of butter (= 125g), because that seems to be the magic number for a lot of recipes.

BUTTER TO THE RESCUE!!!

And apparently it worked, because I was able to press the mix into the tin, bake it for 45 minutes, cool it and slice it up in the tin like the instructions told me (I sliced whilst it was still a wee bit warm, otherwise it would have been too hard).

Bada-bing, bada-boom.

(Do you like the platter? My friend Ness bought it from me from a ceramics shop in Barcelona we once visited - and loved, but did not buy from - back when we were impoverished, post-university student backpackers. Flash forward five years, and she picked it up for me while she was there with her husband, Adam. Thanks, Nessa!!! xoxo)

The only thing I'll say is that the biscuits around the perimeter of the tin were quite a bit too crunchy, and I suspect that if the ginger had been glace and not crystalised the mix would have been moister. Next time I would bake them for closer to 35 minutes and use the glace ginger, and maaaybe a smidgen more butter, or perhaps half a teaspoon of baking soda for a bit of FOOF! (<-- that's supposed to convey magical airiness. Fail...). Meh, live and learn - I found them to be quite tasty as they were. I'm also not entirely sure what is so Dutch about them...

Sad Little Emo Gingerbread Men

Last year I came across these awesome gingerbread man cutters on the Pioneer Woman’s website. They’re called Already Been Chewed and they look – you guessed it – like they’ve already been chewed.

I ordered them  (God bless the internet!) and they arrived, and quite some time later I finally took them for a spin and was really satisfied with how they turned out. Sure, my floodwork icing leaves a bit to be desired (I actually didn’t bother watering the icing down, instead opting to smear it about with a toothpick), but I had fun doing it. I also succeeded in producing royal icing from scratch (i.e. from egg white, not from powder) that was of a pipeable consistency. It probably wasn’t as stiff as it should have been, but it was certainly better than my last attempt. Then again, I wasn’t quite as ambitious this time...

I used the gingerbread recipe from AWW Cooking School book I got from Grant for Christmas (tip to you fellas out there: if your missus likes cooking, a cook book is a mutually beneficial gift that just keeps on giving!).

Please note that I did in fact edit that photo and made the cookbook upright, but for some reason I can't fathom, even though it appears upright in all thumbnails, it insists on tipping on its side.

I was making an effort to use my new book, inspired by Kirsti’s cooking challenge), and even though they didn’t turn out looking quite as peppy as the picture (were they ever really gonna?), the texture and flavour was really good. Well, good enough to inspire me to eat them in groups of three (you know, one of each type of missing appendage, you know, for the sake of equality and all). The only down side is that they tasted ever so slightly eggy, but I reckon that could be combated with the application of additional spices (probably ground cloves) to mask it. They were still mighty tasty, though!

INGREDIENTS: Note: please check cup quantities - the g ones are right but I can't read the c ones

(Biscuit dough) 125 butter; 1/3c (70g) firmly packed brown sugar; 1/2c (175g) golden syrup; 3c (450g) plain flour; 2tsp ground ginger; 2tsp ground cinnamon; 1/2tsp ground clove; 2tsp bicarbonate of soda; 1 egg, lightly beaten; 1tsp vanilla extract; (Royal icing) 1 egg white; 1c (160g) pure icing sugar; food colourings

METHOD:

(Biscuits)

Melt butter, sugar and golden syrup in microwave safe bowl, uncovered, in microwave on High about 1min. Remove from microwave (caution! Hot!); cool 5 mins.

Sift plain flour, spices and soda into bowl; add melted butter mixture, eggs and extract. Stir until combined.

Divide dough in half; knead each half on floured board. Roll to 5mm and cut.

Bake 10mins/until golden brown. Cool on tray.

(Icing)

Beat egg white in small bowl with electric mixer until just frothy. Gradually add sifted icing sugar, beating well after each addition, until stiff peaks form.

Something I loved about these cutters is that you actually get a heck of a lot more mileage out of each roll-out of your dough, which saves a lot of mucking about. They fit together quite well, probably due to the absence of their limbs (heh. Have you ever been cuddling your partner in bed, and wished that you could temporarily detach an arm to make things more comfortable and less awkward? Wait, that’s not just me, is it?? Oh. Ok L). So you get a batch of biscuits that are a lot more even in texture and height, which is always a good thing, because it means they all come out quite uniformly.

Somewhere before this point, I actually remembered to play around with the shelves in the oven to get them at the right height BEFORE I turned the heat on, and in doing so, discovered what I took to be the thermostat's temperature probe was just hangin' out in the middle of the oven, right in the way, and probably broken. This was around the point where I began to swear...

So then I tried to fix it and put it back in those brackets you see on the side of the oven... and broke one of the brackets!

Oops. Also, that mark on my hand isn't dirt - it's a blood blister from doing the Tree to Tree Adventure on our cruise.

But I managed to poke it into the remaining brackets, and it seems to be okay...

So here are my delicious, uniform, sad little Emo gingerbread men.

Sorry about the photo, by the way. I was still using my awesome digital SLR camera (which Grant got me for my birthday... which I’m not sure I have actually mentioned on this blog, but the point is, it’s awesome) on Auto at the time. I think I might have figured out how to manually get better results now, though, so hopefully from here on in my (new) food photos will look better.

Oh, and next time I’m totally getting black food colouring and giving my Sad Little Emo gingerbread men hair. It’s only right.

Meanwhile, I have my eye on a set of NINJAbread men cutters! Click on the P-Dub link above for details.