One of my Christmas presents was Dan Lepard‘s new book Short and Sweet
I’ve made these toll house yo-yos before and I have mucked around with the recipe a bit – mainly because the original makes use of custard powder and this is something we never have in the house.
These are easy to make and you can pretend they’re healthy, as they contain oats. In addition, you can make the mixture up, wrap it in cling film and freeze it for when you need it.
Grind 75g of rolled oats to a powder.
Then beat 150g unsalted butter with 175g of icing sugar, until light and creamy. Add 175g of plain flour, the ground oats, 2 tsp vanilla essence and 2-4 tbsp of milk (enough to bring the mixture together). Finish by adding 150g of dark chocolate, broken up. Lepard says to cut the chocolate into ½ cm chips. I am way too impatient for that type of thing. Typically, I roughly chop the chocolate and then throw it into the MagiMix. However, I think this is the wrong approach. You are better off using a stand mixer to make the biscuits (yes, you’ll need to make sure you butter is slightly soft and not rock hard out of the fridge) and mixing in good quality dark chocolate chips/buttons at the end.
Why?
Because if you use my slap dash approach, you end up with biscuits that have a kind of uniform brown background to them, and if you take a bit more time, you’ll have cream biscuits attractively studded with chocolate.
However you get there, roll your dough into a log approximately 5cm in diameter, wrap in cling film and refrigerate for around ½ an hour.
When you’re ready to cook, preheat your oven to 180°C, line a baking sheet with baking paper and simply cut your log into discs 1-1½ cm thick.
Bake for 25-30 minutes until golden and cool on a baking rack. Dan Lepard sandwiches the biscuits together with an icing made from icing sugar, vanilla essence and milk. I am FAR too lazy health conscious for that! The biscuits are perfectly good to eat without sandwiching!