biscuits

Fruit and seed flapjack

~ Kate ~ Leave a comment

flapjack

Makes 10-12

125g butter

125g brown sugar

125g honey

250g rolled oats

100g dried fruit – we had raisins and dates

30g mixed seeds

Melt the sugar, butter and honey together. Stir the dry ingredients together wildly so that the mixture is catapulted across the table, carpet and chairs. Add the melted ingredients and combine, flicking globules of warm mixture across the room and cackling madly. Press into a 20 x 25cm or so tin, bashing one small area like a drum until it is extremely flat but ignoring the rest. Cook at 180 degrees or on the grid shelf on the bottom of the Aga roasting oven with the cold shelf two shelves above, for 20-25 minutes. Put the bowl on your head and lick it from the inside. Dance on a chair while your mother tries to sweep the flapjack mixture up around you.

Cut into pieces in the tin while still warm.

Chocolate orange cookie-cutter biscuits

~ Kate ~ Leave a comment

cookie

Mostly we just snack on fruit – more because Bert’s appetite for sweetness is insatiable than any principled rejection of sugar. And let’s face it, he’s already a well padded boy. But everyone could do with a biscuit now and then and these are more fun to cut out than play doh is.

We used the letters B, E, R and T and some random animal shapes. Use all the letters of the alphabet for the opportunity to offer someone a snack and insult them at the same time.

Makes about 30 small biscuits

250g plain flour

125g butter

80g icing sugar

Tablespoon of cocoa powder

Finely grated zest of an orange

Juice of an orange

Rub the butter into the dry ingredients by hand, or put them all into a food processor until they start to look like breadcrumbs. Add the orange juice till the mixture comes together and then bring it into a ball and chill.

Roll out on a floured surface to about 5mm thick and cut out your shapes (or encourage a child with still developing hand-eye co-ordination to do the same – you may lose some cookies to raw tasting). Put on a lined baking sheet and cook at 160 degrees (I did it on the bottom rung of the roasting oven with the cool shelf two shelves above) for about 10-12 minutes.

I see this is the first time I’ve tagged ‘chocolate’ as an ingredient. How restrained I’ve been.