Kids Dish

So I dipped into my Bootlegged Mrs Beeton today for the first time, and as I had some visitors dropping in, and wanted to start out with a fairly basic recipe to start gauging the value of the book, I decided to start with Simple Biscuits.

The first annoyance was that not only the butter, but the dry ingredients were measured by weight rather than the more sensible ‘cups.’ Even if I had a kitchen scale, who can be bothered using it for flour??

So Idid my usual thing of measuring out the butter based on the percentage of a 500g tub, and sort of guessed the rest based on that to produce some nice cup measurements. I also removed the lemon rind as I have an anti-rind fanatic in the household, and added a few more tweaks of my own, and the points of difference between my recipe & the “original” are now so many that I have no compunction in publish the recipe I used, so:

Tansy’s Bootlegged Mrs Beeton Plain old Ordinary Tea Biscuits.

Ingredients:
100g/4oz butter
nearly one cup lightly packed brown sugar
1 egg
2 cups self raising flour
flat white chocolate buttons for decoration (optional)
handful of 2 of the following: rolled oats, rice bubbles, cornflakes, sultanas, chopped dried fruit, choc chips, marshmallows, anything else interesting along these lines that you have in the cupboard… (optional)

Pre-heat oven at 160ºC/325ºF (I have a fan forced oven so dropped off 10ºC)

Pu down baking paper on two baking trays. (grease them if you must, but really, why? If you’ve got half decent paper it shouldn’t be necessary)

Mix ingredients together with a fork until nicely blended into a soft dough.

Roll dough into small balls somewhere in size between a macadamia & a walnut. Set out a trayful of balls, well spaced apart.

If you followed this recipe, you probably have less than half the dough left, so feel free to add a couple of handfuls of random interesting ingredients to the remaining dough to bulk it upand make an interesting variation. I used a small handful of rolled oats and another of sultanas, but any candy, dried fruit, nuts or breakfast cereal could be used - empty out your cupboards.

Mix ingredients in remaining dough and then lay out second tray of balls.

Optional decoration: I popped a flat white chocolate button on the top of half of each batch of balls before baking (cos I’ve got this huge bag of white couveture buttons I picked up at the Danvers chocolate factory on the weekend). The result was a nice crispy, caramelised chocolate button on top of those biscuits, so I recommend you try this! Any chocolate could be used.

Bake for 20-25 minutes.

Eat - yummy!

The result was a nice light biscuit to be scoffed with a good cup of tea. The variations I tried all worked really well, especially the baked white chocolate buttons. It made about 20-25 bikkies of various sizes, and the varations meant I had four different kinds of bikkies for my guests to choose from!

I may experiment further with how far I can push this recipe before it becomes something entirely different… but good plain biscuit recipes are hard to find, so I’d be interested to hear if anyone tries out this one, and what variations you invent to add to it!