A Nice Biscuit and a Cup of Tea

Joachin decided to make cookies today. Sick and tired of always being the last to get to the Jaffa Cakes, he decided that the only way to be sure of having a biscuit was to make his own. He started with Mary Berry’s Cake book. Initially, he was sceptical that this was the right place to start on the, fairly reasonable, grounds that a biscuit is not a cake. However, I reassured him that he would find biscuits if he looked hard and enough and, sure as mustard, there they were buried in between celebration cakes and teabreads. Actually, he found loads of them, not just in the chapter entitled Biscuits and Cookies, but scattered throughout the book. Presumably, Mrs Berry’s publishers wrote to her, complaining that the book wasn’t long enough and she had run out of cakes. I mean, fair enough. Once you’ve done, sponge, battenburg and fairy, what have you got left?

Pretty early on, Joachin decided he wanted to make shortbread. This made things easy, we just had to look up the shortbread recipe. We turned to the index…
Who knew there were so many types of shortbread. Strawberry Shortbread, Millionaire’s Shortbread, Easy Shortbread, Bishop’s Finger Shortbread and Walnut Shortbread. Even accounting for the fact that many of these are just shortbread with stuff in, this is several shortbreads too many.

Once we had discarded all of the interlopers though, we were left with Special Shortbread and The World’s Best Shortbread. The choice, at this point, seemed self-evident. The better option seemed to be right there in the title. Joachin raised an objection when he read the recipes though. There was a slight discrepancy in the number of biscuits made.
“The Special Shortbread makes thirty,” said Joachin. “But the Best Shortbread makes seven. That’s not the best. Thirty is clearly the best. Seven is just disappointing.”

The matter was settled when we discovered that the Best Shortbread also required semolina, an item I’ve not felt the need to have in my cupboard since my experience of it as school as a rice pudding substitute more reminiscent of wallpaper paste. Flour we have, but semolina is in somewhat short supply.

The next problem came when Joachin came to the sugar.
“What’s light muscovado?” he asked.
“It’s brown sugar,” I told him.
“Have we got any?” he asked.
“Use white sugar,” I suggested. “It’ll go brown in the oven.”
In the end, I left him to it. I went upstairs to do some writing.

Some hours, and several games of Solitaire later, I got a call.
“They’re ready.”
I went down to the kitchen. Sure enough, sat on the cooling rack, were thirty, slightly misshapen cookies.
“You’re allowed two,” said Joachin.
I took one. Much as I love my son, he is not an experienced chef. They looked fine, but I’ve been fooled before. We all remember Bethan’s experiments with turmeric.
I took a tentative bite.

It was delicious.

Tomorrow, I’m going to ask him to make me a hobnob.