Biscoff Biscuits Made Of Biscoff Biscuits

I love Lotus Biscoff, those caramelized biscuits that are often dished out in fancy cafes. A Belgian staple since 1932, the name is a combination of “biscuit” and “coffee” – genius!

I also love the fact that Lotus bakeries have made a spread out of the squashed biscuits – it’s really delicious on toast and vegan-friendly too.

But having a slightly twisted mind, I decided it would be great fun to turn a spread made out of biscuits, back into a biscuit.

I have had a few trial runs and made the following observations:

 

1. Use a mixer. I usually cannot be bothered to get my free standing mixer out of the cupboard, as it weighs an absolute ton, but for these biscuits, it is vital that the butter and sugar creaming stage is intensive, so the mixture turns pale. Doing this by hand would be quite the palaver.
2. Do use light brown sugar. It helps the biscuits keep their shape. You can substitute for other sugars, but be aware that the cookies may spread and not be as beautiful
3. Don’t be tempted to put too much Biscoff spread into each cookie – they will split
4. Use a plain cookie dough. I made a version with cocoa powder and it slightly overpowered the Biscoff taste
5. Do use white chocolate. Milk and dark chocolate will also eclipse the Biscoff taste.
6. You must freeze the Biscoff spread first and get it out at the very last minute to put into the cookies
7. Don’t bake the cookies for too long. They should look slightly underdone when you remove them from the oven, as they continue to cook once on the cooling tray

Meta Cookies

Half a jar of Lotus Biscoff spread

175g light brown sugar

120g butter. I use unsalted, but salted would be fine too

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

200g white chocolate, chopped into small chunks

275g plain flour

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 tbsp cornflour

Line a baking tray with greaseproof baking parchment. Using a teaspoon, drop 15 blobs of Lotus Biscoff spread across the paper. Cover with another piece of parchment and place in the freezer for 30 minutes to 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 170C

Using a free standing mixer or a hand mixer, cream the butter and sugar together until the mixture is several shades paler than when you started and the texture is light and fluffy.

Beat the egg and vanilla extract together in a small bowl. Add to the butter and sugar and mix in.

Add the flour, cornflour and bicarbonate of soda to the mix. Stir it in slowly at first, so your kitchen doesn’t get sprayed with white powder. Increase the mixer speed until all the flour is mixed in and you have a smooth dough.

Stir the chocolate chunks in by hand and place the dough in the fridge to chill for 5 minutes.

Remove the dough and Biscoff  spread blobs from their respective cold areas. Line two/three large baking trays with parchment. You can use the parchment that went in the freezer, if you are feeling thrifty.

Take a tablespoon of cookie dough and wrap it around a frozen blob of Biscoff spread. Place it on the baking tray – it should look a little like a golf ball. Try to keep a distance of about 2 centimetres between cookies. You may need a third tray for the last couple.

Put the cookies in the oven and bake for 10 -12 minutes. They should be pale but firm. If you prefer very crunchy cookies, you may leave them for 13-14 minutes.

Put on a cooling tray and allow to cool a little before devouring. Warning, the Biscoff centre will be lava hot!

 

 

Scottish Love

The Scots know how to have a good time in January. While the rest of Britain makes empty promises to itself, relinquishes pleasure and embraces misery, the Scots begin the year with a two day party. As the month of January progresses and spirits in England and Wales dip lower and lower, the Scots keep themselves happy by stabbing a lamb intestine stuffed with minced lung with an enormous knife, whilst reciting poetry in foreign. Yes, Scottish people are truly inspirational.

The Scots are sadly not famed for their cuisine;  tedious statisticians often cite Glasgow as having a particularly unhealthy diet. The Scots are famed for their creativity with a deep fat fryer and their love of bizarre fizzy drinks and tonic wine, but this is not a fair culinary story. Scotland has the best game, the best salmon, the best beef (Aberdeen Angus is not an Australian cattle breed, as someone Australian announced to me recently) the purest water, magnificent whisky and a fine ability to turn boring old oats into delicious biscuits.

Another January food fad appears to be to pack up eating wheat for a while. Wheat is in bread, cakes and biscuits, which are never popular with dieters. Oats, on the other hand, have a more wholesome image and although they contain gluten (so this recipe is not suitable for coeliacs) oats are more digestible and therefore diet-compatible than wheat. Oats have healing qualities too:  after I had Number One Son and was feeling utterly miserable about being a mother -I read that oats are a natural antidepressant, so I stuffed myself with delicious oatmeal biscuits and soon perked up. January is reputed to be the most depressing month of the year (unless you are Scottish) so eating the oat biscuits described below, should be a healthy, natural  and delicious way to lift the spirits.

This recipe is unbelievably simple. It tastes magnificent, and in the spirit of Scotland is very frugal. The recipe only calls for a small quantity so splash out and buy the finest olive oil you can afford. These biscuits are vegan,(so perfect for Veganuary) and taste particularly delicious slathered with squashed avocado, pepper and lemon.

Happy Scottish Biscuits

200g porridge oats (super cheap ones are perfectly fine)

50ml extra virgin olive oil

Sea salt

Black pepper

a little boiling water

Place half the oats in a blender and blitz until they become a powder. Pour into a bowl with the whole oats, salt and pepper. Add the olive oil and then a little boiling water and work the oats into a dough.

Roll the dough out to about a quarter of an inch thickness. Don’t be tempted to roll them any thinner than this as they will crack and break. Cut them into rounds (or hearts to show your love for Scotland), place them on a lined baking tray and bake in an oven at 160C for about 15 minutes. They should look pale, but be crispy.

You could add a little dried mustard and paprika, or herbs to the mixture to make more fancy biscuits, but I think these are wonderful just the way they are.

Spice Men

 

 

 

I like to imagine that I am quite handy on the internet -being a writer, and relying on it  for research, as a communication tool etc. etc. Yet, the internet can surprise one with quite extraordinary, horrifying and weird results if, like me, you enjoying typing peculiar terms into search engines.

Today I typed ‘Food which looks like humans’ into Bing. It came up with a bunch of things about cannibalism, which was completely fascinating and disgusting at the same time. I am always desperate to ask the chefs I interview how they would cook human flesh. I once asked Alvin Leung how he would cook a mammoth, if they were not extinct, (he would cure it and make ham) -so it is not shyness about asking silly questions which prevents me, rather a very tiny shred of decorum which reminds me that: ‘Talking about cooking people is not nice’. However -I did once ask a wine expert which wine he would pair with human flesh and he said: ‘Riesling’. So we’ve got half the battle sorted anyway.

What is definitely worth typing into a search engine is ‘Food which looks like people’. I found an apple core which looks like Jack Nicholson, a panini which didn’t look like anything much, except slightly overdone and a fish finger which was the image of E.T.

Why was I typing that into a search engine? I have lost my voice, which is one of the worst things that can happen to me -so to cheer myself up I decided to make gingerbread men for Christmas. I began to wonder why on earth we want to make human shaped things and then eat them. But I got lost in fish-finger-E.T.-land so never found out. Please do tell me if you know.

I don’t really like gingerbread very much -so I made Spice Men instead. They are easy, cheap and fun to make -but they do taste a little dull unless you coat them in thick lemony icing. You could make a hole in their heads before cooking and then hang them on the tree as edible ornaments, or just pretend to be a cannibal and eat them while they are warm.

Spice Men

75g butter or dairy free spread (leave the butter out of the fridge to soften)

100g caster sugar

1  egg

250g plain flour

½ tsp baking powder

1 tablespoon ground mixed spice

½ tsp vanilla extract

Zest and juice of half an orange

For the icing

200g icing sugar

1 tbsp. lemon juice -water to add to make it a thick paste

Cream the butter and sugar together in a mixing bowl. Add the egg and mix in carefully, then add the orange zest and vanilla extract. Sift the flour, baking powder and spice into the mixture, add the orange juice and use your hands to combine into a firm dough. Add flour/water to adjust to the correct consistency.

Once you have formed the dough into a ball, cover it in cling film and put it in the fridge for an hour. I hate doing this -it is soooo dull, but it does make a difference.

After the dough has chilled, remove it from the fridge and its cling film and roll out to a couple of millimetres’ thickness. Using a man shaped cutter, create your spice men, gathering up the scraps of dough and re-rolling to create more. Place on a buttered baking sheet and cook at 160C for 10-12 minutes. They should be a very light tan colour -don’t let them get too dark.

Once the spice men are out of the oven and while they are still hot, place streaks of thick icing mixture from the head to the toes (and across their arms). The heat of their bodies will even out the icing. If you are a perfectionist, then ice them properly when they are cold.

 

 

The Best Biscuits In The World. Fast

I like biscuits – I like plain, digestive-type biscuits, to soak up the phenomenal amounts of tea I drink each day. But I dislike paying a fortune for them, and I particularly dislike the rubbish that factories stuff into shop bought biscuits. It isn’t hard to make biscuits that are nicer and far cheaper than the ones in the shops.  It is frankly quicker to bake them yourself, than it is to get down to the supermarket, jostle for space with lots of really gormless shoppers who are staring at packets of food as if they have fallen out of the sky, to queue for hours and then have to schlep home again. I’m not insane – you will have to buy the ingredients for baking biscuits yourself at some point, unless you have a field, a cow, a sugar plantation, refinery and a mill, but these ones do use fairly ‘store cupboard’ stuff.

If you have the ingredients in, these biscuits can be yours in about 25 minutes. And if you buy in bulk -future tedious trips to the supermarket can be limited.

The basic recipe produces something along the lines of a Hob Nob – salty, sweet, oaty crunch. I love ginger so tend to chuck a teaspoonful in along with the dry ingredients, which gives a little heat. Mixed spice (1tsp) adds something deeper but less ‘bought’, which I am ashamed to say is what I love about this recipe. I have swapped golden syrup for honey before now – and the honey brings its own floral dimension to the biscuits, which is frankly too pretty for my taste. But as the kids say – it’s all good. Give them a try…

Fake Hob Nobs

8oz plain flour
8oz sugar
8oz rolled oats
8oz butter
1tbsp golden syrup
1tbsp hot water
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

Mix the flour, oats and sugar in a large mixing bowl. Melt butter, syrup and water in a pan. Stir in the bicarbonate of soda. Don’t let the mixture get too hot – you just want it to create a golden liquid.

Add the contents of the saucepan to the dry ingredients. Mix well with a spoon. It should be reasonably firm but still a little wet.

Take a teaspoon and dollop heaped spoonfulls of the mixture onto a greased and lined tray. Use a fork to flatten them slightly. If the mixture is very firm – the biscuits won’t spread too much, so you can place them fairly closely together. If the uncooked mixture is slightly runnier – make sure there is plenty of space between each biscuit. I quite like to let the mixture ‘sit’ for about ten minutes, to allow the oats to swell up and make it all a bit more manageable.

You will need to bake multiple batches as the recipe is generous and makes around 30 -50 coookies depending on size. I would advise using baking parchment to avoid them sticking and to make it easier to line up the next batch.

Place the baking tray of biscuits in the oven at 180 degrees C for 15 mins. They should be golden, rather than actually brown. Allow them to cool on the baking parchment before removing them.

If you are a chocolate fiend – melt some dark chocolate over a saucepan of water (or carefully in a bowl in the microwave). Dip the cooled biscuits into the melted chocolate and allow to cool (as long as you have enough self control) before scoffing.