Kolakakor

We've invited some friends over for afternoon tea on Saturday and as I'm working in the City since a week ago, I need to start well ahead, since I also have to do a number of shopping excursions to get the ingredients.

So I started by buying most things today and making something quick. Thus the fudge biscuits. Besides, Lundulph has been asking for chewy biscuits for ages. The recipe is from my Swedish book on 277 types of cakes. It also utilises some ingredients that aren't readily available in the UK, so here is my version.

Ingredients
Makes about 60 pieces
320 g plain flour
5 g baking powder
160 g unsalted butter at room temperature
130 g granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
40 g golden syrup
30 g maple syrup

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees centigrade and line 2 - 3 baking sheets with baking paper.
2. In a large bowl, mix together the flour and baking powder.
3. Add the remaining ingredients and pinch together into a dough, but careful not to over-work it. It should just hold together.
4. Divide up the dough into pieces, then each piece rolls out to the length of the baking sheet and is about 2 cm in diameter.
   
5. Place two rolls per baking sheet only and bake until golden brown. The recipe said 15 minutes, but I ended up baking them for 22 minutes.
6. Take out from the oven and immediately cut into pieces at a slight angle, then carefully transfer to a cooling rack and let cool down completely, then they will go harder and chewier.
   
7. Once completely cooled, store in an airtight container and careful, they are very moreish!

I divided the dough into 6 parts of 115 g each and baked on 3 baking sheets. The first two went in as rolled and seemed to take ages to swell up. At the 15 minute mark, the edges had reached the right colour, but overall the sticks were fairly pale. Once they were golden brown, the edges were slightly overdone, so when I cut up the pieces, I trimmed the edges and gobbled them up together with Lundulph, while they were still hot. I then flattened the second and third batches, but it didn't seem to make much difference.

I think my baking sheets are about 35 cm long and I got precisely 60 nice biscuits from this bake. We also tried one completely cooled down biscuit and it was very crunchy and chewy. Initially Lundulph thought they weren't sweet enough, but actually they were, it just takes a few seconds to kick in. Thus we're going to bed happy and sugared up tonight.

Update 16th March: After a week in a box, the biscuits have gone hard and lost most of their chewiness. I also felt they weren't sweet enough. I think caster sugar next time instead of granulated and maybe increase the amount of the golden syrup too, it's really sweet.