Do you want a biscuit that is crunchy, crumbly and melts in your mouth? This is it. And the joy of them is that you don’t need a cookie cutter. The dough is rolled into a sausage shape and the biscuits are sliced as thick or as thin as you like. They do expand a little in the oven, but not much, so when you are cutting them, cut them as thick as you want the finished biscuit to be. The beauty of this recipe is that you can cut just a few biscuits and the dough will be fine to stay in the fridge for up to 5 days. Or you can wrap it in cling-film and freeze it.
Ingredients:
80g walnuts
30g almonds
30g hazelnuts
225g butter
55g brown sugar
250g plain flour
2 tablespoons maple syrup
When I made these biscuits for the website, I didn’t have any plain flour, so I made them with self-raising flour. I have made them many times before at the café and always used plain flour, but I can’t see that there is any difference, so just use what you have.
I have used walnuts, almonds and hazelnuts, but feel free to experiment with different nuts, or just use one. Peanuts would work well, but make sure you use plain ones, not the salted type.
The nuts need to be roasted in the oven at 170 degrees for 10 minutes. Before you think that you can’t be bothered with this stage and you might just skip it; please don’t. Roasted nuts are so tasty and as there are a lot of nuts in this recipe, you will affect the flavour if you don’t roast them. Leave the nuts to cool and then blend them into breadcrumb size pieces in a food processor or just crush them with a rolling pin. Don’t over-blend them, as the walnuts will go oily.
Weigh out around 20g of the nut crumbs and put to one side. You will roll the biscuit dough in these crumbs later.
To make the biscuit dough, beat the butter and sugar together, making sure that the butter is nice and soft. Then add the flour and the crushed nuts and finally the maple syrup.
You want to end up with a soft consistency that you can easily handle. Sprinkle your worktop with some flour, so the dough doesn’t stick and roll the dough into a sausage shape, the size of the cookie. When you have rolled it, sprinkle the worktop with the remaining nut crumbs and roll the biscuit sausage in the nuts, so that it is coated on all sides.
Leave the dough in the fridge for a couple of hours and then slice the biscuits as thick as you like and bake on a baking sheet at 190 degrees for 10 – 12 minutes, depending on how thick your biscuits are. They will be ready when they are nice and brown.
Let them cool for a minute on the tray and then transfer them to a wire cooling rack.
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