More biscuits (cookies)

Every year around this time, I get the yen to bake biscuits to give people at Christmas. I suppose it’s the cold weather that puts me in the mood for baking. When it’s cold, wet and miserable outside, it’s  lovely to be inside in a cosy room surrounded by the fragrance of baking.

My godmother used to come to us every Easter and Christmas, and she’d always bring a tin of home-baked biscuits. They were the sort made with a biscuit press, and we kids always loved them, and we each had particular favorite shapes. I love one shaped like a flower, and I’d break each petal off one by one and eat it, making the treat last.

So I thought I’d make a few Christmas boxes for friends, and I’m trying out different recipes, deciding which ones will make the cut. I’m looking for around 6 kinds of biscuits (cookies). Anzac biscuits , some kind of shortbread (of course),  chocolate chip biscuits and acetani (Italian almond-orange chewy biscuits – see the pic on the right) are definites and I’m experimenting with others to decide. As well I need to make some gluten -free.

These are the cookies I baked.

I make a batch and try them myself (of course) and then pass them onto friends or the trainers from my gym to get some feedback. A few have been okay, but not quite up to scratch for the Christmas box, but today I made a batch of “Almond Joy” biscuits that were delicious. Here’s the recipe if you’d like to try it. It’s an American recipe but if any people from Australia, NZ, the UK or Ireland want my converted-into-grams recipe let me know and I’ll send it.  (We need to do that as US cups etc are different from ours.)

I made a few changes — I used dessicated coconut, not the sweetened coconut flakes, as that’s what I had, and besides I thought there was enough sugar in the recipe. I didn’t use normal chocolate chips — I buy bigger “dark chocolate melts” and chop them up, so in each biscuit as well as chunks of chocolate there are shreds and the flavor is much better.  I didn’t have a small egg, so I used a normal large one, thinking I’d add some flour if the mix was too runny, but it wasn’t. I baked the first batch for just 10 minutes, and they were perfect. The second batch I left in the oven a little longer and the biscuits were very crunchy and somehow not as tasty, so I’d recommend sticking to just 10 minutes.

These are the cookies from the Small Town Woman site

Mine don’t look as good as hers — those are hers on the right, I’m not sure why. Maybe it was the larger egg after all, or the difference between desiccated coconut and the sweetened coconut flakes — mine certainly spread more than hers did. Still, mine were quite yummy and I’m very happy with the recipe as is.

Next I want to try making rugelach. And jam drops (aka thumb print biscuits.)

I’ve also collected some recipes for plain, non-sweet biscuits; sesame crackers, cheese crackers, seedy crackers, sea-salt water biscuits, and cheese and rosemary savoury biscuits. I’ll keep you posted.

Please don’t think I’m wasting my time playing with recipes. I am writing — working on Marcus’s story, at long last. The baking is for my play time. And  my friends, and the trainers at my gym happily accept my experiments, so I’m not even gaining weight! 

And if you have any biscuits that you think should be included in my Christmas collection, let me know.