I was recently reading the Bourke Street Bakery cookbook and there was a recipe in it for ‘oat and barberry biscuits’. Normally I’d skip past a biscuit recipe, but this one made me stop – foremost because I wondered ‘What on earth is a barberry?’ Then I looked at the ingredients and thought, Yippee! I have all those (except the barberries, naturally). I looked in the cupboard and found some glace cherries and thought the might do as a substitute. And they did! If you’re thinking it looks like an Anzac biscuit you’d be right – the original recipe is an adaptation of the perennial favourite.
Ingredients
165gms (1 2/3 cups) rolled oats
220g plain flour
100gm desiccated coconut
175gm brown sugar
85gm glace cherries, chopped
185gm unsalted butter
60 ml golden syrup (or honey)
1.5 tsp bicarbonate soda
60ml water
1. Preheat oven to 170 degrees.
2. Combine oats, flour, coconut and sugar in a bowl.
3. Put butter and golden syrup in a saucepan on low heat and melt the butter. Take off heat and add the cherries. Combine bicarbonate of soda and water and stir into the pan. Pour the wet mixture over the dry and stir quickly, while still foaming. Mix well.
4. Roll into even size balls in the size you desire. (The original recipe says this makes 12; I got more than that. Obviously if you do more/less you’ll need to amend the cooking time a bit.) Put on a lined baking try and flatten slightly with a spoon.
5. Bake for 15-20 minutes (keep an eye on them). Take out and cool.
Notes:
1. Riley ate these despite the presence of evil fruit in the form of cherries.
2. They were all gone within a day or so. These will be a school lunchbox feature this year.
3. The Bourke Street Bakery picture has these squished down really flat, but I kept mine in a rounder, chunkier shape.
This is week fourteen of the 1 recipe a week for a year ‘living list’ challenge. (14/52)
