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...

Strawberry Meals Forever

Fanny Cradock is always inspired by the seasons as to what to whip up for us to enjoy. She's just a little bit ahead of herself here though as she urges us to prepare for splendid days of Summer. She's planted some lovely strawberry plants, carefully selected for both flavour and flower, in every nook and cranny of her, she would claim, modest garden, and is keen to make the most of them while the season is here. I am all for pretending that it is already summery strawberry season. We all need a little sunshine in our life don't we?

I am not using home-grown strawberries. Even it were the correct season, I have nowhere to grow them. No nooks or crannies. Fanny would be sad for me. She does enter, a little unusually I feel, into a prayer for those who have home-growing abilities though. Fanny's prayer is for their health. She prays that they are using all natural compost in their gardens, and are totally bereft of artificial sprays and fertilisers, so that at the very least the little strawberries arrive at their doors safe and pure. We would all say Amen to that.

Fanny considers a range of special treats that would be enhanced by chemical-free strawberries. Perhaps a Strawberry and Cream Choux Paste Gateaux is what you are dreaming of? Maybe you'd prefer Choux Paste Strawberry Swans? Possibly a Strawberry Mille Feuille is more your thing? Or a simple Sponge Sandwich with Strawberries? Whichever it is, Fanny rustles them all up. She claims they are perfect if you want to make something gorgeous even if you can't cook. Awkward. Presumably they are good too, even if you can. They all involve simply filling the chosen sponge or pastry with strawberries and cream. Sometimes custard too. My prayers have been answered.

I'm in the mood for Strawberry Shortbread. Fanny gives it the usual French translation to fancy it up - Gâteau Biscuit Anglais aux Fraises Chantilly - but when you get down to it, it's shortbread, strawberries and cream. Fanny makes her shortbread with butter, sugar, self-raising flour (which she is sure will horrify the Scots, but she insists on using it for everything) and also rice flour. She creams the butter and sugar together, folds in the flours and presses them into suitably buttered and floured moulds for baking. Simple. A moderate oven will suffice.

While one shortbread circle is cooling, Fanny suggests cutting the other in half ready for presentation.  When both are fully cool, she piles in sliced, hulled and heavenly strawberries, pops the two halves on top as 'wings' or a lid, and adds generous amounts of piped cream. I'm not sure where this traditional display originates, but it does make a very pleasing offering. The shortbread is crumbly and buttery. The strawberries sweet and juicy. The cream light and fluffy. Next time I need a little sunshine in my days, this will be my go-to brightener. Let's pray for all those that are burdened by chemically treated fruits while we are feeling so worthy.

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?

Oh, Flour of Scotland!

Fanny isn't feart (scared) of anyone, and certainly not the entire Scots nation. She feels her instructions are clear, follow her and you will succeed is her mantra. Even when it just seems wrong. Or maybe just not what we are used to. Fanny reckons that all Scots will 'have a fit' at her recipe for Shortbread because she insists that we 'stick to self raising flour' even for this. She never wavers from her love of self-raising. Maybe to try and appease each and every Scottish person alive and dead, she includes three different recipes with differing and different ingredients to make standard Shortbread, Scotch Shortbread and a 'wild alternative', Orange Shortcake.

The technique remains fairly similar for this related trio. The key thing seems to be to make sure that the ingredients don't get too warm while they are being prepared. Fanny says to mix them on a cold surface. I use a chilled bowl as I don't have the marble work tops installed Chez Cradock. First take the butter - which can be squeezed vigorously through a clean cloth if it's a little liquidy, eek I'm not sure but I'll skip this, it sounds messy - and the sugar together. Work them up with a small knife in each hand. Chop chop. It's Fannys favourite technique, and it's a little like fencing. Not that I've ever tried fencing, but I'm imagining. Keep chopping away until they are well combined, simple as that, making sure that the 'warmth of the human hand' goes nowhere near it, as the butter will 'oil'. Some would say that Fanny had no human warmth of course.

After some furious chopping the flour is added in gradually. More chopping. It's really quite good fun (maybe actual fencing is too?) but I reckon you could give it a quick whizz in the food processor and achieve the same result. No fun though. For the 'Standard Shortbread' it's a mix of self-raising flour and Rice Flour, but for the 'Scotch' version no Rice Flour is used. The chopping results in a crumb-like mix, and this is Fannys cue to us all to stop. Check your hands, not for cleanliness, but for warmth again. If you have been furiously fencing with the knives as explained your hands may be hot, so plunge them in a bath of ice cold water before proceeding. Brrrrr.

For both shortbreads, the crumbs need to be pushed into butted and floured moulds to bring them together. Cold hand remember. For the Scotch version I'm using an oblong dish and to complete the Saltire Flag 'illusion' I sprinkle on some blue sugar before baking. Fanny prefers to decorate them after baking with holly leaves made of fondant, and ONLY AT CHRISTMAS (because presumably it's too costly at other times of the year) a thick dusting of icing sugar. That sifter is never far from Fannys warm almost human hand at this time of year.  The 'Orange Shortcake' is altogether different.

The ingredients are different for a start - quite a bit of baking powder is added to the already lifted self-raising flour, with salt, an egg yolk and orange juice joining the sugar and butter. It's all chopped together in the same way, with the orange juice being added gradually until it forms a paste. I added some harmless food colouring to the juice to make it even more orange-y. Fanny warns that the amount of juice you will need to add depends completely on the size of your egg yolk, so please do not 'slop on regardless'. Give the paste a quick knead, roll it out either into one big circle or cut into fun shapes. I've gone for a selection of Halloween ones, ghouls, pumpkins and cats which don't really look like cats, and therefore don't feature in the finished photo. I reckon Fanny would like it, keeping up the cold, inhuman feel. The final results are as ever great. All three shortbreads are light and the orange ones are puffy, but still buttery, slightly crunchy and crumbly. The orange ones aren't very orange-y, but still taste good. Maybe some orange icing would help. Or fondant. Or orange flavoured icing sugar thickly sifted. Not that likely to spook my fellow country folk at all are they?