Intro
This is, without doubt, the very best of my recipes for slices. It has all my favourite flavours: coconut, caramel and rolled oats. These are reminiscent of Anzac biscuits - a great Kiwi classic (yes - I will give recipes for these too).
Recipe
Base
Cream together
- 200g butter
- 150g sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
- 2 cups flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
Filling
Melt together
- 1 can sweetened condensed milk
- 25g butter
- 1 tablespoon golden syrup
Topping
- 70g butter rubbed into
- 1 cup rolled oats (organic oats are worth it - truly)
- half cup coconut
- quarter cup flour
- quarter cup brown sugar
Wish I had this in the trenches when I worked in a wee Italian restaurant. I'm certain it would have gone over quite well.
ReplyDeleteFor those of you rolling on the floor in peals of laughter at the very idea of me baking for a living, you are certainly in the right. Its Library equivalent would be me manning yer Reference Desk. The garde manger side of this station suited me well, the pastry duties, not so much.
Luckily, I had an *excellent* mentor of an executive chef who didn't object to a good deal of handholding. There are two paths to success in cooking - you can have boatloads of talent (he certainly did) or ye can know yer food chemistry (he knew this by trial and error.) Better to have both, of course, but quite rare.
Enough of me, time for the useful bits.
When creaming your butter and sugar, you really do want to beat the Dickens out of it. Do yourself a favour and start with a nice fresh butter. If it's greased up and yellow about the edges when you slice it, it is no longer either nice or fresh. The Dickens has left the building when the colour takes a turn for the lighter side.
As far as your sugar is concerned, feel free to delve into the slutty pleasures of vanilla sugar from time to time. Using it here would be a good addition, methinks.
I wonder at what the average Kiwi uses for vanilla. I'd hazard it's Tahitian. At risk of a pie to the face, I snub it for Mexican. Mexican can stand up to my bullying chocolate a wee bit better. Tahitian tends to get lost in the sheets. I can't argue with the usage of a fine Madagascar, of course.
With a dark bottle and all of the time in the world, you can brew your own extract, which I'd encourage you to try at least once. There are rumours on the Interwebs about using водка as your base. Don't do it. While I admit to a curiousity about how much time it would take to smooth the edges on poitín, I'd use neither it nor водка. The smoothest I've ever had was a brandy based essence. Bourbon is the olde stand by for Massey's. Rum is certainly a fine choice, as well. I can swear in retrospect that the brandy brew was reduced a touch prior to bottling. Incredibly fussy pastry chefs might have an array of extracts at their fingers.
Yanks, you can get the dastardly invention that is golden syrup from King Arthur.
sugar, butter, sweetened milk, coconut, golden syrup, brown sugar...
ReplyDeleteNow why exactly are _organic_ oats worth it?
I'll bet it tastes really yummy!
--Greg
Organic oats just taste so much better - its not about health at all in this recipe!
ReplyDelete