oh for some breeze and a biscotto!

I don't know if you've read that book by Joshua Ferris - half my fellow tube-travellers seem to have their noses buried in it so maybe you have. 'And Then We Came To The End', it's called, and it's set in a modern-day workplace. The workers are 'creative types', as opposed to the accounting types that surround me here, but there were some gems of workplace observations that I think will wring a wry smile of identification from most any of us who spend our days under humming fluorescent lights, wrestling with supposedly ergonomic chairs, staring into the glare of our screens. One phenomenon well known to anyone of the office-worker clan is those fluctuations in the passage of time. How the morning, punctuated by coffee breaks and cemented together with email updating can fly by, but then the afternoon can leave you dazed, beleaguered, emerging into the outside world, feeling a time-space continuum must have been breached and surely a decade has passed by...

Oh, sometimes - like now - time drags. And eyelids droop and minds melt, and thoughts turn to the joy of being free...

Like last bank holiday - (praise be for the 3-day weekend!) - when I walked up to Hampstead Heath, and I could curl up in the grass, and feel the wind playfully muss up my hair as I lost myself in a book and watched the city from through the grass.

And then I went home and made biscotti. And they were so incredibly easy. I love things that turn out good but take so little effort. Perfect! I thought, for impressing people who come round for dinner. For a simple dessert - a little vin santo dribbled over some good vanilla ice cream, biscotti on the side. Or just a good little nibble to go with the coffee.

Or, you know, they can always just sit there in a tupperware box on the counter, and I'll eat one when I get home from work, or as a little 'breakfast dessert' after my toast and cereal, or take them to work for my morning tea break etc. etc.

I just finished the last one, 5 weeks later, so that's what I'm thinking of now, lying in the grass on the heath, or having a slow cup of milky coffee in the sun, a zesty, nutty little biscotti for dunking and crunching alongside

Unfortunately, I don't have the recipe I used right here... but hold on and I'll post it as soon as possible, so watch this space.

And now, there are 38 minutes til hometime. I've expertly wasted a good chunk of afternoon work time so I had better do something before I escape into the lovely warm summer's evening...

Update - I've finally got internet access and the recipe together at the same time!

Biscotti (adapted from Leith's cookery bible)

Mix in a bowl: 200g plain flour; a pinch of salt; 1/2 tsp of baking powder; 40g ground almonds; 75 g sugar; 75g chopped or flaked almonds.

Make a well in the centre and add two lightly beaten eggs. Gradually incorporate dry ingredients to make a firm dough.

Roll the dough into a long sausage shape about 2 cm in diameter. Slice into two or three sausages so that they fit on a baking tray.

Place the rolls at least 5 cm apart on the baking sheet and bake in a preheated oven (190C/350F/gas 5) for 20 minutes.

Remove the rolls from the oven nd turn the temperature down to 80C/175F/gas 1/4

Cut the rolls at a 45-degree angle into 1cm slices and place on the baking sheet. Bake for a further hour, turning the biscuits over after 30 minutes. Leave on a wire rack to cool completely.

The Guest Slot #3 - Gluten-free cookies

This time it's Big Sister Saucepan who's augmenting the saucepan repertoire with a culinary contribution from the other side of the world. The first specialist gluten-free recipe on the blog as well! Which reminds me, Shauna's book is out in the UK now so I must go and look that up sometime soon...

Anyway, back to the biscuits. Apparently these are so good they have to be strictly rationed in the BSS household. Sounds good to me...

Gluten Free Orange Dark Choc Chip Cookies (alternative Lemon & White Choc)

125g unsalted butter
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
The rind of an orange, finely grated
1 cup baby rice cereal (or cornflour)
1 cup plain gluten free flour
2/3 teaspoon bicarb soda
200g choc chips

Preheat over to 170degrees. Line tray with baking paper
Cream butter and sugar until creamy
Add the egg and orange rind until all combined
Separately, mix the flours and the bi carb
Fold this into the egg mixture along with the choc chips
Once all is mixed together well roll into small balls and flatten slightly. They flatten during cooking.
Cook for about 20 minutes or until golden brown.

Oh yes!...

... black treacle AND golden syrup!

To me, this is always a sign of a good thing. In this case the good thing is flapjacks. Soft, treacly flapjacks.

I think it occurred to me to make flapjacks because I bought one from a shop the other day and it tasted so sickeningly sweet - all glucose syrup and margarine - that I couldn't finish it.

I like good pale flapjacks (the ones made just with golden syrup, butter, oats and sugar) - especially chocolate dipped or fruit filled - but I like treacly ones better. And I hear treacle is a good source of Vitamin B, so they're practically a health food.


This recipe is the one my mum used when we were little - it's child-level simple and it makes dense ginger-y treacly bars, perfect for lunch boxes, or afternoon snackage. A good addition is some chopped dried apricots for a little extra fruitiness and moistness.

Treacle Flapjacks

In a saucepan, melt 75g butter with 50g dark brown sugar, 1/2 tbsp of golden syrup and 1/2 tbsp black treacle over a low heat until all combined.

Mix in 50g wholemeal flour, 75g porridge oats and 2-3tsps ground ginger (and 25g chopped dried apricots - optional)

Squash into a shallow dish and bake at Gas 3-4 for about 45 minutes until it looks set and browned on top. It will still be a bit wobbly at this stage, but will firm up as it cools. Slice while its still hot, but let it cool and firm before removing from the dish.

(NB - I like Jordans Organic Porridge Oats the best - they are the only ones I can find that are proper whole oats, not mashed up little pieces.)

Cookies

So, you want to say ‘Thank You’ or ‘Happy Birthday’ or ‘Welcome’ or maybe just ‘Hello’ or ‘Mid-morning break!’. And you want to not just say it, but bake it. What could be better than a batch of homemade cookies?

Who can not like cookies?

(Not that I had anything in particular to say, just certain ingredients to use that lent themselves to cookie-cooking. But as soon as I had made them I thought, what a good little gift these would make... )

These particular cookies are from The Cook’s Book – one of those books with big photos of clear, numbered steps to perfection that almost makes you feel anything in the world – buying a house, finding a husband, upholstering chairs, solving the middle east crisis - should be perfectly simple if you just follow the nice, ordered steps properly.

Well, whilst this is obviously not the case, happily the cookies, although they don’t look much like the picture, do look strikingly gorgeous, once all steps have been properly adhered to. It’s just a matter of a simple dough mixture, which is chilled and then sliced. Maybe 20, 30 minutes to make, and 10-12 to bake.

This recipe makes about 30 large-ish cookies – plenty for giving and sharing. The original recipe was the chocolate-nut version, but I’ve included the other two varieties I tried – Chocolate Orange and Orange and Blueberry. The blueberry ones (below), due to more moist berries and less dry nuts, were a bit moister, cakier than the others. Still delicious, but in a less cookiesome way.

Cookies - Three Ways

150g (5½ oz) butter
1 tsp salt
240g (8½ oz) light muscovado sugar
2 eggs
225g (8 oz) flour (I found you needed actually a little bit more than this – experiment until the dough sticks; it doesn’t need to be dry but not too gloopy)
1 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda

For Choc-Nut variation
120g (4oz) chopped nuts (hazelnuts, almonds, pecans, macadamias, whatever you fancy)
240g (8½ oz) really good chocolate (at least 70% cocoa solids – I used Green and Black’s cooking chocolate)

For Choc-Orange variation
Finely grated zest of two large oranges
240g (8½ oz) really good chocolate

For Orange-Blue variation
Finely grated zest of two large oranges
Two handfuls of frozen blueberries

1. Cream the butter, sugar and salt together until light and fluffy
2. Mix in the eggs one at a time until well combined
3. At the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and which ever of the additional bits you are using (chocolate etc. )
4. When it is mixed into a dough scrape it into a ball with your hands then roll out into a sausage shape about 5cm in diameter
5. Wrap in foil or cling film and put in the fridge for at least 2 hours (you can leave it overnight if you want to prepare a day ahead)
6. Preheat oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4
7. Cut the dough into 1cm thick slices, put on a greased tray and bake for 10-12 minutes until just golden brown
8. Cool on a rack

NB - The first batch I made I had no bicarb, and they came out pretty crunchy. The second, with bicarb were more spongy and soft. Neither had that perfect balance the book described of being ‘crunchy on the outside and chewy in the middle’ so I’d advise on adjusting your bicarb and baking powder levels – less for those who like a little crunch and more for those of you in the soft cookie camp.

Of Biscuits and Blogging

So I made some Anzac biscuits from a recipe I copied out of a BBC collection of recipes one rainy afternoon in a bookshop somewhere.

They were a little burnt round the edges but thick and oaty and golden-syrupy; satisfyingly different to any shop-bought biscuits.

They went down well with a cup of tea, and they went down well with B.

But I looked at my amateur photos and I considered the unadulterated recipe with its six simple ingredients, and I felt slightly disappointed in these honest, humble, plain chunks of biscuitness.

They weren't, you see, blog-standard food. At least not in my eyes. And with work and studying and so on it's not so often nowadays that I get to really make any food. And without home internet currently, it's even less often that I get to post.

So I've been fretting. It is my wont, as concerns projects and so on. I always want them to be something that it inevitably will not straightaway be. I have a lamentable lack of patience with these things...

But, what negates all that silly fretting is that I am really enjoying having a blog. And what I am enjoying about this project is that I am now actually doing it, rather than just planning it, and although at the moment the reality does not live up to the plans, it is by going through these starting stages that I will achieve what I initially envisaged. By cooking more I will cook better and by writing more I will write better.

So, I'm going to blog the slightly burned and not terribly inspired biscuits. They aren't anything super special, but they are good, and they are another brick in whatever I am building here.

Anzac biscuits
(Makes 20)

Preheat oven to 180C (160 for fan oven), gas 4

Put in a bowl:
- 3 oz oats
- 3 oz desiccated coconut
- 4 oz flour
- 4 oz caster sugar
and mix

Melt together:
-4 oz butter
-1.5 tbsp golden syrup

Stir dry ingredients into wet ingredients gently

Put dessertspoons of the resulting mix on buttered tins about 1" apart

Bake for 8-10 minutes and cool on a rack