Category Archives: biscuits

Recipe: Shortbread with Buddha’s Hand Citrus

Posted on September 3, 2016 | 2 comments

I’ve only seen Buddha’s Hand Citrons once before, and weirdly, only at Coles, but I adore them.  Not only do they look like some sort of unnatural offspring of a lemon tree and a squid (leading to their affectionate nickname in our household of ‘Cthulu-lemons’ or ‘tentacle-fruit’), they smell rather amazing.  It’s a scent I can only describe as perfumed – lemony and floral at the same time. 

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Buddha’s Hand Citron (and I am now feeling rather concerned about the shape of Buddha’s hands, actually) is all zest and pith, with no juicy centre at all.  I’ve been fiddling around with different ways to use it to really bring out the flavour.  My mother’s shortbread recipe, which really only has four ingredients and thus tastes basically like butter and sugar (which, I hasten to add, is not a bad thing in any way) seemed like a good place to start.

The result is… well, it’s a rather nice biscuit, but in the end, I found the flavour rather subtle, and too much like lemon rather than anything else.  But when I tried testing it scientifically on real scientists, they seemed to like it more, and detect a different flavour.  So it’s possible that my tastebuds are just not sophisticated enough for the job.  This is entirely plausible, frankly.  I’ve often suspected that I was a fake foodie in this regard…

See what you think.

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Your shopping list

finely grated zest from one small Buddha’s Hand citron (about 5g)
150 g butter, softened
80 g caster sugar
150 g plain flour
40g rice flour Continue reading →

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Recipe: Coconut Macaroons (Gluten Free)

Posted on December 16, 2015 | Leave a comment

OK, these are *marginally* trickier than my other super-easy cookies, but only marginally, and they are awesome, because I think I may have actually reverse-engineered the macaroons my Oma used to make when I was a child.  They are perfectly chewy and delicious, and basically, I just love glacé cherries, so any excuse to use them is a good one for me.

Enjoy!

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2 egg whites
100 g sugar
150 g shredded coconut (not the evil desecrated kind, the kind that comes in long strands)
150 g almond meal
glacé cherries

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Recipe: Cherry Ripe Cookies (Gluten Free, Vegan)

Posted on December 9, 2015 | Leave a comment

Look!  It’s a slightly different (but still dead easy) biscuit recipe!  This time, it’s vegan!

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I love the idea of two ingredient cookies, where you get a sweetened nut butter and some flour – or chocolate tahini and rice flour and make a biscuit and then bake it.  But let’s face it, sometimes two ingredients isn’t enough.   I found myself eyeing off one of those chocolate and coconut butter spreads in the supermarket and thinking, you know, add a glacé cherry and you’re kind of half way to a cherry ripe here.  And then I thought, yeah, but you need a bit more coconut.

And… that was it, really.  So here you have them – cherry ripe cookies that are vegan and gluten-free.  They are a little chewy and only just barely sweet – most of the sweetness comes from the cherries – but they are nicely chocolatey and coconutty.  (There is a definite air of chocolate crackle to these, too.  That whole coconut and chocolate thing will do that.)

Ooh, and I just realised how you could make vegan gluten-free LAMINGTON cookies, by replacing the cherry with jam!  The possibilities are endless…

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Your shopping list

150g chocolate coconut spread (I used Pure Harvest Coco2Almond spread, which purports to be a health food, but don’t worry, there’s nothing healthy about these cookies)
100g almond meal
50 g shredded coconut
12-16 glacé cherries

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Recipe: Chocolate and Hazelnut Cookies with Wattleseed

Posted on December 6, 2015 | Leave a comment

What’s this?  Could it be… another nut based cookie?  Why yes, yes it is! As you may possibly have noticed, I’ve been breaking out the Australian native herbs and spices for this little round of cookie fetishisation, and I decided to play with a brand new ingredient, wattleseed.

Wattleseed tends to get used in sweets, because it has an allegedly coffee-like taste.  To me, it tasted a bit like burned chocolate, with hints of hazelnut and coffee.  It’s pretty much an Andrew-repellant, because while he likes chocolate, he loathes coffee, and is also fairly firmly against people ruining perfectly good chocolate with hazelnuts.

Good thing he wasn’t going to be eating these biscuits, then, eh?  I decided to expand on this flavour profile with hazelnut meal and cocoa, and would probably have considered garnishing the biscuit with half a coffee bean had I had such a thing to hand (though, on reflection, the flavour would probably be too strong).

Anyway, like the other biscuits in this series, these are very simple and leave you with a nice, slightly chewy little biscuit.  That tastes like hazelnuts and coffee and a little bit like burned chocolate.  Sorry, Andrew.

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Your shopping list

185 g hazelnut meal
15 g cocoa
2 tsp wattleseed, ground (have a good sniff before you use it, so you know what you are dealing with)
1 egg
50 g sugar

Now what will you do with it?

You know the drill by now.  Preheat the oven to 165°C, and line a baking tray with paper.

Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl.  Taste to see if you like the flavour.  Roll into little walnut-sized balls, flatten, then bake for 15 minutes.

Done!

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Variations

As usual, this recipe is gluten- and dairy-free, also low in fructose, but full of nuts and contains eggs.  There are a lot of ways you could vary it.  I think, were I making this again, I might go half hazelnut meal, and half ground macadamias – the hazelnut flavour was quite strong, and nearly overwhelmed the wattleseed.  You could also add more cocoa – my box was nearly empty – just make sure the nut + cocoa portion of this biscuits adds up to 200g.

Enjoy!

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Recipe: Almond Cookies with Lemon Myrtle

Posted on November 30, 2015 | Leave a comment

I’m on a bit of a gluten-free biscuit roll at the moment.  I pretty much have one super-easy recipe, which I vary by switching out the nuts for different nuts, and adding new flavour ingredients.  Done.  In fact, I spent half of yesterday afternoon making variations on this particular biscuity theme – five batches in total – because I am a little bit silly.

Exhibit A: some of the biscuits I made yesterday. Some. Only some.

You could probably do this just as well yourself.  Assuming that you are also silly. But I’m quite pleased with the way the flavour worked for these ones, so I’m recording the recipe here for my use, if not for yours.

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200 g almond meal
1 egg
1 tsp lemon myrtle (you want this in a powdered form, not a form which is leafy for tea)
50 g sugar
mixed peel or pine nuts (optional, for garnish)

DSCN0938 Continue reading →

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Recipe: Quandong and Bush Food Jam Thumbprints (Vegan, Gluten-Free)

Posted on November 13, 2015 | 1 comment

Still with the biscuits.  I made a lot of biscuits last weekend.  Can you tell?  I’m also still swimming in brownie mix, which is completely awesome, though I’m glad I chose the route of sanity with regard to mixing up all the random bits of chocolate and using them as choc chips, and instead grouped them in ways likely to result in pleasing, rather than alarming, flavour combinations.

But I digress.  I had more macadamia nut crumbs leftover after making my super-awesome strawberry gum biscuits, and this inspired me to go looking in my pantry for other bushfood ingredients to play with.  I couldn’t find the lemon myrtle which I am positive is lurking somewhere, but I did find dried quandongs and also a mixed bush-fruits jam from Outback Spirit (they don’t seem to make it anymore, alas, but you can get Rosella Jam here).  Good enough!

The dried quandongs looked a little unpromising at first, being very hard and dry and woody in texture, so I reconstituted them with water and found them pleasingly tangy.  Also, when blended, they were moist enough to obviate the need for egg in the biscuits, yay, vegan biscuits!

The biscuits came out a lovely pink colour, but alas, lacking in the expected tang.  Instead, they tasted mostly like a macadamia-based jam thumbprint – which is certainly not a bad thing to taste like, but is nonetheless a little disappointing if quandong was what you were after.  I’d recommend adding some quandong essence if you have it, or maybe some lemon or finger-lime zest to the dough. (Finger lime zest would be better, from a bushfood standpoint, but you’d probably need a few of them to do the job…)

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25 g dried quandongs (mine came from Footeside Farm)
1/2 cup water or lemon juice
100g macadamia nuts
zest of 1 lemon
100 g almond meal
30g maple syrup
about 6 tsp rosella jam, or other bushfood jam

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Recipe: Super Nutty Snickerdoodle-doos (Gluten-Free)

Posted on November 11, 2015 | Leave a comment

What sort of word is Snickerdoodle, anyway?  A silly one, that’s what.  And these are silly biscuits.

No, actually, they aren’t all that silly.  In fact, as biscuits go, they are quite responsible.  They are not too sweet, a little bit chewy, and have a nice, nutty, cinnamon sort of taste that begs to be paired with a nice glass of milk.  I don’t actually like walnuts very much, but these biscuits somehow sneak around that, despite being really rather walnutty, and convince me that I want to eat more.  This is perhaps less responsible biscuit behaviour, but then, it is probably unfair to blame the biscuit for the fact that I want to eat it, don’t you think?

The mix of nuts is based purely on how much was left in a bunch of open packets of nuts that I found on my kitchen bench.  I think walnuts, pecans and cashews make a nice mix, and have the sort of dark nutty taste that pairs well with spices (I think of pistachios or almonds as having a lighter nutty taste.  Cashews are somewhere in the middle and could go with either) but the proportions could easily be varied, as could the nuts themselves.

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Your Shopping List (or leftovers list, as the case may be)

100 g walnuts
60 g pecans
40 g roasted cashews
1 tbsp cornflour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp cinnamon
100g caster sugar
1 egg
cinnamon sugar to sprinkle

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Recipe: Strawberry Gum and Macadamia Biscuits (Gluten-Free)

Posted on November 8, 2015 | 2 comments

Hello!  I’m back!  The Centenary Games are all over but the shouting (alas, there is quite a bit of shouting still), and I am actually getting to do things like come home from work on time and then SLEEP.  During which time I dream about the Centenary Sports Carnival and its controversies, but hopefully this too shall pass.

One of the more unfortunate side effects of not being at home much for months and months and months and not being in any fit state to think or do anything creative when I was has been the insane buildup of random stuff all over my kitchen.  I am too terrified to tackle the pantry just yet, but today I went through the fridge and started going through the mess on the benchtops and kitchen table.

The result?  The discovery that I had about twelve open packets of nuts of various varieties in numerous degrees of fullness, as well as an inordinate amount of butter and the last little bits of a truly ridiculous range of chocolates (some from Easter, some from Christmas, some from zombie Catherine making ill-advised purchases when there were specials at the supermarket).

Obviously, the only response to this situation was a nut- and chocolate-centric baking frenzy, and so this afternoon, I have made four kinds of biscuits, three batches of my brownie packet mix (each featuring a different collection of chocolate odds and ends), and some rather decadent-looking raw chocolate lava cakes that will be tonight’s dessert.

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(And now I have no desire whatsoever to make dinner, for some reason.  Who would have imagined this?)

Anyway, the good news for this blog is that three of those recipes were brand spanking new ones (where on earth did that saying come from, anyway?  I have a feeling that if I try Googling this, I’m going to see things that I cannot unsee, so I think I’d better leave well alone), which means that you have three gluten-free biscuit recipes coming soon to this blog.  Huzzah!  And one of them is vegan!  Double huzzah!! And two of them are really, really easy, fast ones, too!  Triple huzzah!

Yeah, I’m a little manic right now.  Hi!

These biscuits fall into the super-easy category, once you find the strawberry gum in the first place.  This is an Australian native ingredient – a eucalypt with a strawberry scent to it.  I got mine from Peppermint Ridge Farm, who visit a number of Farmers’ Markets around Melbourne.  Herbie’s Spices also stock it, though I think their herb had a milder flavour than the one I used.  I recommend adjusting the recipe to taste – it tastes pretty much the same uncooked as it will cooked, though the herb fades slightly in the oven.

I’m super happy with this recipe.  It tastes like nothing I’ve ever baked before, and it is both simple and delicious.  Also, the biscuits come out an attractive shade of pale green.  I think I’ll be using these in my Christmas hampers…

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100g macadamias
100g almond meal
1-2 tsp powdered strawberry gum leaves (check the taste before adding the second teaspoon)
50 g sugar
1 egg

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Recipe: Ridiculously Decadent, Sin-Black Biscuits for Purim

Posted on March 17, 2015 | 1 comment

OK, so the first thing you will notice about this post is that it isn’t Purim.  (Perhaps I am overestimating my readers’ grasp of just when all the Jewish festivals are, but then again, since my readership is full of bakers, and Purim always seems to me as a religiously-mandated excuse for baking – you’re supposed to make little baskets of biscuits and give them to people, this is the festival I would make up if I made up festivals – my chances might be better than I think.)

The second thing you will notice about this post is that my last sentence went on and on and on and on and on…

The reason for both these things is Project Grants.  They are due tomorrow.  There were 19 of them in my group, plus a few little Cancer Council and Cancer Australia bagatelles, and I have been reading them.  And proof-reading them.  And, occasionally, inserting sarcastic marginalia into them.  This has been phenomenally time-consuming, and has probably not improved my ability to write sensible sentences.  Next week, we have fellowships, the week after that we have more fellowships, then there is Easter, at which point I will escalate my current insane Lenten singing schedule into something that borders on the impossible, or at least the highly improbable, after which we have more fellowships, a grant report, two events that I am running in late April, and a Program Grant due in May.  And a concert the day before the grant goes in.  Hooray!

All of which is a very long way of saying that yes, I’m cooking, yes, I’m thinking about food, and yes, I’m even making up recipes.  But sometimes it’s going to take me a few weeks to write them down, because, as you may by now have grasped, I am hardly ever at home, and when I am, it is for sleeping.

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Anyway, back to these cookies, because these cookies are awesome.  They are basically a riff on some cookies in Claudia Roden’s Book of Jewish Food, only I changed virtually all the ingredients.  As you do.  But they are still sort of the same cookies, in texture, personality, and, most importantly, in their really, really spectacularly easy method.

Also, they really do look coal-black when they go into the oven.  It’s rather awesome.

These cookies take about ten minutes to put together, and then 25 minutes to cook, and they would probably keep very well if I didn’t have hungry scientists who don’t give anything the opportunity to keep well.  Claudia Roden says that the original biscuits keep well, and that’s good enough for me.

As are these delicious, chocolatey, ever-so-slightly boozy biscuits.

Your Shopping List (makes about 16 little cookies, if I recall correctly)

100 g almond meal
100 g hazelnut meal
50 g dark, dark cocoa
75 g caster sugar
1 egg
2 tablespoons brandy (make sure you roll the R when you say it, it’s that sort of biscuit)

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Recipe: Vegan Florentines

Posted on December 24, 2014 | 4 comments

Don’t be scared of this recipe.  It’s much, much easier than any non-vegan Florentine I’ve ever attempted, and tastes just as good.  Though I might use a bit more in the way of fruit and nuts next time.

This recipe is based on a recipe from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar – the recipe was for macadamia lace cookies, and I looked at the picture and thought, ‘That looks like a proto-Florentine to me’.  And then I thought ‘Hey, I bought a whole lot of glacé fruits and also some pistachios yesterday… and I still have some Lindt chocolate and a bag of macadamias in the pantry…’

And really, that was the end of that.  My sister in law wanted vegan desserts for tomorrow – clearly vegan Florentines must be on the menu. 

The amazing thing about these Florentines is how buttery they taste and look, despite having no butter, nor any kind of weird margariney proto-butter.  Mine are a little lop-sided, but if you were the kind of person who likes to make their biscuits super-pretty, you could have at them with a round cookie cutter halfway through baking, to shape them. 

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Your Shopping List

100 g macadamias
135 g brown sugar
3 tbsp (45 ml) canola oil
1/4 cup (60 ml) agave nectar (this is the equivalent of four tablespoons – if you measure the oil first, and the agave next, the agave won’t stick and it will take the last of the oil with it)
1 tbsp water
1 tsp vanilla extract
65 g flour
1/2 tsp cornflour
pinch of salt
50 g chopped glacé cherries
50 g chopped pistachios
25 g chopped glacé ginger
50 g chopped glacé apricot or pineapple150 g good dark chocolate

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