Fanny Takes The Biscuit

Fanny Cradock just loves tiddling things up. She can't leave anything alone. Nothing is safe from her nimble fingers, cunning plans and decorating box of tricks. Plain old things bore her to tears. The nasty neighbours would talk about you over the fence if you served them something basic, or even if they spied it on your plate... Why on earth would you have something 'ordinary' when you could transform it into 'extraordinary' in a flash? 'Stripped down' and 'modest' were not in Fanny's vocabulary.

Even the simplest of biscuits could be tiddled up from basic to fancy. Shortbread is often thought of as a simple biscuit, but in Fanny's world this needn't be the case. Fanny is not suggesting that we all spend hours and hours in the kitchen creating ridiculous showstoppers (ahem, biscuit Chandelier anyone?), however with a little bit of imagination and some store cupboard essentials, the nasty neighbours may just be, reluctantly, voting you as Star Baker when the pop round for afternoon tea.

Fanny's shortbread is made from a mix of ordinary flour and Rice flour (for a crunch), butter and caster sugar. The butter is beaten with the sugar, and then the mix of flours gently added in to combine. The mixture resembles breadcrumbs really, but should clump together between your hands if you give it a good squeeze. Think of this nasty neighbours and cackle loudly as you do it.

Fanny then rolls out the crumbly mix and begins the transformation from unvarnished to embellished. A third of the dough is cut cleverly into leaf shapes. Fanny does this freehand, so do I. I don't have any leaf cutter, but you may do. A third are cut into simple rounds with a very ordinary cutter. The final third are also cut into rounds, with the centre of half of those cut with a piping nozzle to make rings. All from the same austere mixture. The simple rounds are to be glazed with egg white and scattered with almond flakes. Leave the rest bare and bake for around eight or nine minutes. Just time to lean over the fence and gloat to those neighbours.

Let the tiddling begin! The almond rounds are already tiddled, so set them on a rack to cook. Carefully, they will be soft until they do. The rounds with holes become like Jammie Dodgers, filled with jam. I have used Rhubarb and Gin jam for mine. Gin helps everything. This is not enough tiddling for Fanny however. Slice a coloured glacé cherry in half, plonk it in the centre and add a sprig of cut Angelica. There is no explanation of why, but tiddle away and ask no questions. The leaves are tiddled with melted chocolate chips, covering only half the leaf. Tiddling done, the nasty neighbours will think you've been at it for hours...

They Eat Horses, Don't They?

These days it is dead popular to hide things in food for children to get them to eat the stuff they wouldn't normally choose. Usually healthy items, like vegetables. Fanny Cradock had a very different perspective I think, she liked to encourage the little ones to make their own bits and pieces, knowing that they'd be more likely to eat their own creations. Each part of the weekly series ends with a 'recipe' for small fry, quite unlike anything you'd see today. Either that or Fanny thought the wee ones needed some extra encouragement to eat more biscuits and chocolate...?

I know what you are thinking - biscuits and chocolate, it must be chocolate biscuits? Clearly just having chocolate biscuits alone is just not enough for Fanny. Where would the fun be in taking ordinary shop bought biscuits and adding your own chocolate? Well, it sounds ok to me, and would surely keep the nippers quiet for a while at least? But no, Fanny has to take it to a different level, naturally, transforming the ordinary shortbread biscuits into horses.

Yes, horses. It wouldn't be my first thought either. Perhaps some of Fannys friends with children (did she have any?) were equine obsessed, and needed little horse-shaped snacks to take to the gymkhana? Fanny makes it all sound so easy, simply cut the shortbread biscuits in half and scoop out a little circle from the middle to give the impression of legs. I ended up with half a packet of broken biscuits as they crumbled either when cutting or scooping. My knife cut them into many bits, and the piping nozzle I used to create the 'scoop' shattered those that survived. It was like a nightmare Grand National where only one or two made it past the finish line.

Perhaps Fanny smashed all her biscuits too, she doesn't let on, but she uses little off-cuts to make the horses heads and tails by sticking them on with some melted chocolate. She uses ordinary milk chocolate, but I have white. My horses I feel need to be grander. Fanny has given me aspiration, if nothing else. In sticking on the heads and tails there are a few more breaks and mishaps, so the chocolate becomes more like glue, which is quite ironic.

Finally the 'horses' are dipped in the remaining melted chocolate, which is easier said than done, to cover them before being decorated with eyes (little silver balls which ended up all over the house when I dropped the box), saddles and reigns. Fanny makes hers from almond paste, but I have some cake modelling sugar paste for mine. Just not sure what to do with all those broken biscuits, apart from scooping them up and eating them myself... Fanny displays her horses in an inedible field of fake grass, and gives them a bowl of nuts to 'eat'. I've spent the best part of an hour collecting up little silver balls, so mine are left to frolic carousel-like on an orange-half with the aid of some well-placed cocktail sticks. I'm not so sure any children of today would be impressed, they wouldn't win the dressage would they?

Too selfish to keep these treasures to myself, I am entering them in this months Treat Petite, hosted by Cakeyboi this month, (Baking Explorer Kat will be sorry to miss these) which has an 'Anything Goes' theme. These fit so well, don't you think?