PARMESAN BISCUITS (canapé size)

I recently spent a happy half hour (or more) leafing through my cook books for recipes for nibbles.  We had friends coming for lunch and I found myself with the luxury of time on my hands that would enable me to do more than just spread some paté on bits of toast or put olives in a dish.

I found a Nigella Lawson recipe that I liked the look of and with all the ingredients to hand thought it worth a try.  The recipe makes a bowl full of little cheesy biscuits for now and enough mixture to freeze half of it for later.  Always a good idea in my book!

Very easy to do, delicious and highly recommended.

And then there were three!

Ingredients

150g plain flour

75g grated parmesan (I used the ready grated kind as that's what I had in)

100g butter, softened

1 egg yolk

Method

Put all the ingredients into a large bowl and mix together using an electric hand mixer until it comes together in a large clump.

Transfer to a work surface and knead briefly until smooth.  Divide roughly into equal halves.

Take one half and roll it into a log then an even cylinder about 3cm diameter, with nice flat ends.  Wrap in cling film, twist the ends to secure and chill for at least 45 minutes or until needed, by which time it should be firm enough to slice easily. Repeat with the other half of the dough.

Preheat the oven to 180C / 160 fan / gas mk4.

Unwrap one or both cylinders and slice neatly and evenly into discs about 1cm thick.  I got 20 discs from my first one (the second is in the freezer).  Some of my discs looked rather irregular in shape but miraculously turned into nice neat circles when cooked.

Arrange on a baking sheet lined with baking paper (one sheet for each cyslinder) and cook in the oven for 15-20 minutes until a pale golden brown (depending on how thick the discs are).

Makes about 20 biscuits per log.  Store in an airtight tin or box (if there are any left!).

CINNAMON BAKED PLUMS and a biscuit discovery!

In return for some courgettes and tomatoes, my friend Sally gave me a huge bag of plums the other day.  Our own plum trees have had hardly any fruit on them since the bumper crop a few years ago and we do love plums so I was very grateful!

Knowing what to do with so many at once was a head scratcher.  We were expecting visitors but they have  a long list of things they don’t like.  Plums are on the list (as are courgettes and tomatoes).  So with a need for baking but not with plums I had to do something to preserve them for our own use later.

Cooked plums take up less room in the freezer than whole ones so I decided to roast them.  We sat for a while at a shady table in the garden to halve them and remove all of the stones.  This was a bit fiddly but worth the trouble; the plums were at various stages of ripeness so some of the stones were easier to remove than others.

I then simply spread them in a single layer in roasting tins, sprinkled with demerara sugar and a dusting of ground cinnamon.  I baked them at 180° fan for 20 minutes by which time they were nice and soft and sticky.  We had some on our breakfast cereal and some with ice cream and a mini stroopwafel  The rest went into the freezer for future enjoyment.

Stroopwafels - where have they been all my life?  I had never heard of them until I spotted them in a French discount store called "Action". They are delicious little wafer sandwich biscuits with a caramel filling.  Utterly divine and wickedly sweet but luckily the mini version is not too detrimental to the waistline - as long you don’t eat too many!  They go perfectly with ice cream, fruit salad and Sally's delicious plums!

GINGER SPELT BISCUITS - more pandemic cooking.

 

I don't make biscuits very often but these are my favourites to make when I do.  The interesting thing about them is that they're made using spelt flour.

 

With ordinary flour being rarer than hen's teeth at the moment it occurred to me that one of the flours that might have been left behind on the supermarket shelf by the stockpilers is spelt flour.  So you may just be able to get your hands on some.  In which case I would highly recommend these biscuits.

 

 

 

They're quick to put together and bake in just 7 minutes or so.  The added bonus is that the kitchen smells wonderful the minute you start to melt the butter and golden syrup in the pan!

 

They're a lovely, chewy, gingery biscuit, crisp on the outside and softish in the middle.  They don't actually keep all that well and tend to soften quite quickly - but then keeping them is not usually an issue - they tend not to hang around for too long in our house!

 

Ingredients

 

50g butter

50g golden syrup

50g preserved stem ginger from a jar, chopped fairly small

50g golden caster sugar

50g light soft brown sugar

1 egg yolk

150g spelt flour

1 tsp ground ginger

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

Method

Preheat the oven to 200C / 180 fan / gas mk 6.  Line two baking sheets with baking paper.

Put the butter, syrup and stem ginger in a small pan and warm gently until the butter has melted.  Enjoy the glorious aroma!

Remove from the heat, beat in the sugars and egg yolk, followed by the remaining dry ingredients.  Mix together until well combined. 

Take smallish, walnut-sized pieces of the dough (mine weighed about 15g each) and roll into balls.  Divide the balls between the baking sheets allowing plenty of room between them for them to spread.

Bake for 7-8 minutes until golden brown and puffed up.  Remove from the oven and leave on the baking sheets until they have collapsed back down.  Then lift them carefully onto a wire rack to cool.

Makes about 30 biscuits.

LEMON BISCUITS

I rarely make biscuits of any kind but, with visitors expected, I decided to make some for a change.  Time was short and I thought they would be quicker and easier to do than rustling up a cake or buns of some kind, with fewer ingredients to weigh out and less baking time needed.

I used Mary Berry’s recipe for Fork Biscuits, adding some lemon zest for flavour.  They were done in no time at all and turned out really well.

They were crisp, crunchy, crumbly, light and buttery with a hint of lemon.  Hardly any effort at all to make and well worth it.  They were just the right size, easy to eat and kept well in a tin for a few days – until they were gone!  An excellent recipe that I will definitely be using again.

Ingredients

100g softened butter or Flora Buttery

50g caster sugar

150g self raising flour

grated zest of 1 lemon

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C / 160° fan / gas mk 4.  Lightly butter two baking sheets.

Put the butter into a large bowl and beat until light and soft.  Beat in the caster sugar and lemon zest.  Next beat in the flour.

Using your hands, bring the mixture together into a ball and flatten it slightly.  Cut it into quarters then cut each quarter into four which will make 16 balls about the size of a large walnut.

Arrange the balls on the baking trays, 8 on each, spaced well apart.  Using a fork dipped into a jug of cold water, flatten each biscuit and leave the fork pattern in the top.

Bake for 15-20 minutes until light golden brown.  Lift carefully off the trays and cool on a wire rack.

Makes 16 biscuits.

LULU BISCUITS

Dom at Belleau Kitchen has another Random Recipe Challenge for the month of June and this time it is to cook something from the most recent cookbook received as a gift. 

The “rules” of the challenge are that you open the book at random and cook whatever is on the page where it falls open.

I have acquired a few cookbooks this year but most of them were gifts from me to myself so I didn’t think that would count.  So I had to look at the gifts I received at Christmas.

My work colleagues gave me the Hairy Bikers “12 Days of Christmas” cookbook but I really didn’t fancy cooking anything vaguely Christmassy in the middle of June so I put it back on the shelf.

Nick gave me the “River Cottage Everyday” cookbook, which is wonderful, but every time I let it fall open it was at a page of typical HFW ramblings, not of an actual recipe, which I took as a bit of a hint not to use that book.

So that left just one book, the third I received at Christmas and which was given to me by my niece Joanna.

When I opened it on Christmas Day I thought it was a joke book but in fact it is absolutely serious.  We already cook most of  Lulu’s food for her because we think she is allergic to the colouring in some dog foods.  Every so often her skin erupts into huge and itchy bumps (which drive us all mad with her scratching) but it has been much improved since we took control of her diet.  This book has given us some good ideas on expanding our canine-cuisine repertoire !!

When I flipped the pages it fell open at “Honey Dog Biscuits” – perfect !!

The ingredients are simple and wholesome and you just combine them all without any fuss and roll out the biscuit dough.  I found the dough very sticky so added about a tablespoon more of the  wholemeal flour to be able to roll it out.

You cut them into small dog-sized rounds (depending, I suppose, on your size of dog). I used the smallest cutter I had in my set, which was just under 2 inches.   You bake them and then leave them in the oven to dry out.

Lulu was very keen to give her opinion on the biscuits as soon as they were cool enough !!

Once they had cooled a bit, Lulu and I  both tried one !!  They were very tasty, with just a slight sweetness.  The flavour reminded me of the oat biscuits you often get in packs of mixed cheese biscuits and I thought they would go well with a nice piece of Stilton or Wensleydale.  In fact if you rolled them a bit thinner and cut them slightly larger, they would be perfect for that.

Lulu loves them anyway !!

Lulu Biscuits

Ingredients

150g wholewheat flour

150g porridge oats

2 teaspoons baking powder

30g butter

2 tablespoons honey

2 eggs

100ml milk

flour for dusting

Method

Preheat the oven to 200°C.  Grease two baking sheets or line with baking parchment.

In a large bowl, mix the flour, oats and baking powder together thoroughly. 

Add the butter in very small pieces then add all the other ingredients.

Knead together thoroughly.

Roll out the dough to about 1cm thick on a floured surface.  Cut out round shapes and place on the baking sheets with a little space between each one.  (I found the biscuits only expanded slightly).

Bake for 15-20 minutes until golden brown.  Turn off the heat and leave in the oven for 2 hours to allow the biscuits to dry out.

Makes 40 dog biscuits.