mutteringhousewife

I don’t want to be mean or anything, but the Thermomix is no good at creaming butter. There, I said it. Fortunately this is not one of those recipes that requires light fluffy butter, this is another lunch box filler because the cupboard is bare Yet Again.

The reason I’m using the Thermomix for this is because I’ve just made some butter, something that is becoming a weekly occurrence. Rather than wash the jug out, I just move on to making the biscuits, and I’ll follow that up with making raisin bread with the buttermilk. Such a housewifely morning I’m having, waiting for the StarTrak man to come and take away the remains of the epic party we had yesterday. I hope he comes before school pickup time.

Place in a bowl, or in the buttery jug of your Thermomix, 125 grams of butter and three quarters of a cup of sugar. Now you may recall me making a mental note to find out what rapadura was. I found out, and it’s tree huggers sugar. You gently squeeze the cane stalks, lay out the juice in hemp trays in the sun of the summer solstice, then crunch up the resulting solids and sell it to hippies who are convinced it’s much more healthy than evil imperialist white sugar. Anyway, I procured some and used it the first time I made these biscuits. Dear reader, it doesn’t cream with butter very well. You can’t always substitute it for sugar. But this biscuit is a fairly textural thing, so it’s OK, and it has a distinctive flavour that goes really well with the malt. The upshot is, I used half a cup of rapadura and a quarter or a cup of raw sugar. Also add an egg. Cream the lot together. The problem with doing it in the Thermomix is that the isn’t enough of it to use the butterfly, and it’s too dense to really mix up well. The blades make little tunnels in the mix, thus

It mixed it well enough to be going on with. Now add a cup and a quarter of plain flour, half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, half a cup of oats (I’m using the Honest to Goodness five grain mix) and half a cup of malted milk powder. That’ll cancel out the rapadura, the organic grains and the homemade butter. Actually, it doesn’t look too bad, it seems to be mainly powdered malt and powdered milk. I am still looking for a source of malt syrup, so one day this recipe will live up to my homemade ideals.

Mix it all up. If you’re using the Thermomix, remember to put it on reverse, otherwise you’ll chop up all your oats. Blob large pinches of it onto a lined baking tray. They’ll flatten out. Bake at 160 degrees for about twenty minutes, or until they start to go golden. It makes a solid, flavoursome, slightly crunchy biscuit. I should mention that the recipe came from Donna Hay’s Modern Classics 2 book, but as soon as i get the malt syrup sorted, she’s getting no further credit.