Australian · Dessert
Anzac Biscuits
- Easy
- 15 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, an earthy, grounding base, closing toasted and warm.
Ingredients
- 150 g rolled oats
- 150 g plain flour
- 120 g desiccated coconut
- 180 g raw sugar
- 0.5 tsp fine salt
- 150 g unsalted butter
- 90 g golden syrup
- 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 2 tbsp boiling water
Equipment
Sheet pan
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Mix the oats, flour, coconut, sugar and salt in a wide bowl.
- Melt the butter with the golden syrup over low heat until just fluid and pourable, not bubbling.
- Dissolve the bicarbonate in the boiling water and stir it into the warm butter; it will foam up pale and roughly double, and that foam is the entire leavening, so use it at once.
- Pour the hot mixture into the dry, stir to a stiff, faintly greasy dough, roll walnut sized balls and flatten them lightly on lined trays with 5 cm between each.
- Bake at 160C (320F), 12 minutes for chewy or 18 for snap, and pull them while the edges are deep gold and the centres still look underdone; they set on the tray. 12 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Shaping by hand 85 recipes
- The pieces match: weighed, or judged against each other rather than by dividing the mass by eye, so that no piece is half again the size of its neighbour.
- Surfaces are smooth and unbroken with no cracks, tears, or dry patches, and the seams are sealed and sitting underneath.
- The shape is defined and it holds while the tray waits: it has not slumped, spread, or relaxed back out of its form.
- Nothing is trapped that should not be: no air pocket where filling should be, no filling breaking through the surface, and no excess flour greying the outside.
- They finish together in the heat: no piece done while another is still raw, which is the only test that the first mark was met.
Where it goes wrong The dough was worked past its point or shaped without a rest, so it fought back: the pieces spring out of shape on the tray and bake tight, uneven, and torn along the surface.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Demi-sec Champagne
- Also Right
- Off-dry Chenin (Vouvray)
- From the Taps
- Fruited sour
- Zero-Proof
- Coconut water with lime
Tropical sweetness wants bubbles or Chenin’s honeyed acid: richness met with lift, not more weight.
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