Chocolate biscuits

[davidn]

I don't think I'll ever be able to explain why even though I'm lucky to make anything edible for my own dinner while surviving the experience with all my limbs intact, I still enjoy and am rather better at baking - it seems that as long as sugar is a primary ingredient of something, I'm perfectly all right. Last weekend, I made it my ambition to combine an oatmeal biscuit recipe I'd made before with a couple of extra steps, with the aim of making something approaching Hob Nobs.

~ Something Approaching Hob Nobs ~

You need these to make 12 biscuits:

3 oz butter
3 oz caster sugar
1 egg yolk
3 oz plain flour (doesn't even have to be modified for America)
Half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
A pinch of salt
1 oz rolled oats
1 oz of any sweet, oaty nugget-like cereal you can get your hands on. I used something called "Just Bunches" here, and in Britain, I think Crunchy Nut Clusters would work well.
6 oz chocolate chips for melting
Vegetable oil
A mixer
A microwave
An oven
Your hands
Electricity

PROC Recipe

1. Cream the butter and sugar together into a sort of yellow sweet mass in an electric mixer. Then add these:

2. The egg yolk.

3. The flour, bicarbonate of soda and salt.

4. The oats.

5. The cereal.

6. Coldness. (Put it in the fridge for twenty minutes.)

7. Preheat the oven to 375F, 190C or Gas Mark 5, and oil up a baking sheet.

8. Hand-roll the mixture into balls, put them on the sheet and flatten them down with the bottom of a floured glass your fingers.

9. Bake them until they're golden brown. It takes about ten minutes, but you really have to watch them, because if they're in there for too long they'll just burn to a smouldering heap instantly.

10. Use a spatula to get them off the baking tray and upside-down on to a cooling rack (preferably with some paper underneath to catch drips for the next part).

11. Put the chocolate chips in a bowl and add a few drops of vegetable oil, then mix them around - and I really do mean "a few drops!" Even a teaspoonful is too much and will cause the chocolate never to solidify again once it's on the biscuits.

12. Microwave the oily chocolate. Be gentle with them - microwave for about thirty seconds and then stir them around, because the heat will transfer among them slowly - you don't want to burn them. Two trips into the microwave should do it.

13. By any means necessary, get the melted chocolate on to the undersides of the biscuits. You can do this by dipping them in, spatulaing the chocolate over them, or a combination of both. You could even slide them in so that one half is entirely chocolate-coated, but I'm not entirely sure how to dry them in this case.

14. Wait for the chocolate to harden. If you listened to me in step 11, store them in an airtight container. If you didn't, put them in the freezer - they'll solidify in there, and they're also nice if you eat them while they're frozen.

I've actually halved the original recipe because there's no chance that a two-person household can withstand more than twelve of these at a time - they're big and really very filling.

Comments

[davidn]

Well, yes, they've been in our freezer for a week now, disappearing at a rate of one a day!

Those are some very creative suggestions - I would imagine the normal way was to put them on greaseproof paper so that they can be peeled off easily one dry with only a flattening of the underside's chocolate, but I really like the idea of a sort of toast rack style arrangement (though I imagine that it would end up with them completely covered anyway as it dripped). I also have to wonder what the baker above would think of drying biscuits out with a hair dryer! I'll ask.

[kibet.livejournal.com]

I don't think the hair dryer is that bizarre, it is an appliance that people would have handy (or at least those with hair as I don't have one). Afterall, they use a blowtorch in the kitchen.

I had originally thought toast rack but the edges would touch the chocolate part. Using a grill, it could balance from the bottom. Before putting it on the rack, after you dip it in then let excess chocolate run off and only when the drips are 5-10 seconds apart, turn upside down to dry on rack.

Also since you put them in the freezer, could you put them in the freezer beforehand then the hot chocolate is hitting the cold biscuit, and should cool down quicker.