Apart from sourdough I confess I haven’t baked much at all for a while. Mostly because I’m back on Slimming World and TRYING to be restrained...not a word that comes to mind when there’s freshly-baked goodies in the house, with baking aromas wafting around!
But I had the urge to make something. Once a baker, always a baker...
And, whilst I’m not a fan of shop-bought biscuits, home-baked are a different affair! Rather than faff around with a new recipe, I went for a ‘tried and tested’ one that I knew I’d have all the ingredients for, to hand: Cornish Fairings.
The original recipe, on www.thinlyspread.co.uk uses vegan margerine but I used ordinary butter and it worked well.
Similarly, the original recipe says to rub the dry ingredients and the butter together by hand, and I did it that way the first time I made them last year - but today I wanted speed and efficiency so the food processor did the work!
There’s no liquid to bind the rubbed-together mixture, you just add 5 tablespoons of golden syrup - so the ‘dough’ is quite a dry, crumbly one. I recall last time I made them, thinking it couldn’t be right, and adding a little milk; the resulting biscuits were certainly nice but much thinner snd crispier. But if you persevere with the crumblier mixture, mould it using just the heat of your hand into walnut-size
balls, you get a slightly thicker biscuit with a ‘cracked’ finish.
Word of warning: they’re extremely soft when they come out of the oven so don’t try to lift them individually to transfer to the cooling rack - move the whole sheet of biscuits on parchment instead.
They cool and harden quite quickly though, giving a lovely crumbly biscuit packed with flavour.
Further word of warning: you may not be able to stop at one...
Definitely going to try an experiment making these with gluten-free flour and see how they come out - so if it works I can bake some for my mum-in-law!
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