biscuits

Dan Lepard’s Toll House Yo-Yos

- Alex Leave a comment

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One of my Christmas presents was Dan Lepard‘s new book Short and Sweet. I’m a huge fan of his thanks to his column in the Guardian – his recipes never seem to go wrong.

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!

Cheddar and Rosemary Sables

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Rosemary and Cheddar Sables

I have millions (well, maybe not quite) of recipes tagged in delicious and every now and then I make a concerted effort to actually cook one of these recipes. I recently discovered I have over 100 chocolate cake recipes tagged so you can expect to see a flood of those in the near(ish) future.

With the festive season well and truly upon us I’ve been doing quite a lot of party cooking and trying out a few new things. One recipe that seemed both simple and savoury (for some reason, not everyone wants a party full of desserts) was a recipe for thyme and emmental sablés (recipe in French). As I had Gruyère in the fridge I thought this would be the go.

Of course, when I came to make these, I discovered the Gruyère had been eaten but I still had some reasonably good Cheddar hanging around and rosemary, well, it grows like a weed in our garden and Cheddar and rosemary sounded like a good match.

These are super easy biscuits to make but as you do need to keep the pastry cold, don’t decide to make them on a 36°C day!

Take 80g of Cheddar and coarsely grate it into your trusty food processor. Add 60g of unsalted butter, 100g of plain flour, 1 egg yolk, a pinch of pepper (if you can use white, then all the better) and one sprig of rosemary, finely chopped. Give it a quick whizz up and then add a little cold water to bring it all together. The recipe states 5cL of water and I always get really muddled with French fluid measurements. I actually thought it meant 500mL of water (which I knew would be ridiculous) but a bit of investigation shows that it is actually 50mL which is much, much closer the mark. You don’t need very much at all.

Wrap the dough in cling film and refrigerate for about an hour and a half. As I was on a schedule I didn’t have the luxury of that long a rest and things still turned out OK.

Preheat your oven to 180°C (or 160°C fan).

Roll the dough out to very thin – let’s say no more than about 5mm. Work fast: you may need to cut off chunks of pastry and keep the remainder in the fridge as you go along. Cut out the biscuits, place on baking trays and bake for 10-15 minutes. You can see from the photo that you want them to puff up and cook but you don’t want them to start taking on too much colour.

Allow to cool on a rack before serving. They’re perfect as a pre-dinner drink snack, but they’d also be great after dinner with more cheese.

And you could even try making them as Emmental and thyme …

Melting Moments

- Alex Leave a comment

I borrowed the book Cooking:  A Commonsense Guide from the library while waiting for my container load of cookbooks to arrive from the UK.  The book is full of sensible, familiar recipes so I was, obviously, going to try out some sensible familiar biscuits!

The recipe alleges it makes 40 biscuits so I decided to reduce measures by a half:  after all, 40 biscuits is quite a lot for anyone for afternoon tea (and I only had about 100g of butter).  This recipe is given two ‘saucepans’ (the book’s way of grading difficulty) – thus requiring “a little more care and time”.  Thanks to the power of the Magimix, this recipe quickly becomes within the grasp of the nervous baker.  I did not have a piping bag and fluted nozzle, so my biscuits were just generous teaspoon sized blobs, slightly flattened with a damp fork.

These are very quick to put together and use store cupboard standards, so this is an ideal recipe if you ever find yourself in a biscuit emergency (and yes, such a thing does exist).

Melting Moments

For 15-20 biscuits.

90 g unsalted butter
1/6 cup icing sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
1/6 cup cornflour
1/2 cup plain flour

decoration (optional):  glace cherries, blanched or slivered almonds …

Preheat oven to 180C.  Line a baking tray with baking paper.

If using a food processor, beat butter, sugar and vanilla essence together until light and fluffy.  Add cornflour (if doing this by hand, sift the cornflour first) and mix until just combined.

The mixture will be quite stiff.  Spoon (or pipe) onto the baking sheet.  Top with topping of choice (or leave plain) and bake at 15 minutes, until lightly golden and crisp.  Leave to cool on wire rack.  Be aware that, when hot, the biscuits will be very fragile.  Even after they’ve cooled, they are very short so plates may well be the order of the day.

Cooking:  A Commonsense Guide is available from Fishpond for $AU28.97, from Amazon UK for £6.53 and from Amazon US, used from just 44c!