New Neighbour - continued

The second thing I baked to take to the new neighbour's party was the brittle/crisp almond flakes.

Ingredients
Makes about 36

140 g plain flour
0.5 tsp cinnamon
0.5 tsp baking powder
60 g unsalted butter
36 g water
120 g caster sugar
50 g flaked almonds
0.5 tsp vanilla essence

Method

1. Sift together flour, cinnamon and baking powder and make sure they are well mixed together.
2. Place the butter and water in a small saucepan and melt together on low heat.
3. Once the butter has melted, stir in the sugar to warm it up, but not to melt it.
4. Stir in the almond flakes and vanilla essence and remove the saucepan from the heat.
5. Now stir in the flour mixture. It'll become like thick batter, rather than dough.
   
6. Prepare four sheets of baking paper of about the size of your baking trays. Divide the dough mixture between two of the sheets.
7. Place the remaining two baking paper sheets over the dough mixtures, then carefully roll out each very thinly - about 2 mm.
   
8. Stack the two dough sheets one on top of the other, then place on top of a thin baking sheet and possibly also place a second baking sheet over the dough sheets and place in the freezer for at least 1 h.
9. When the time is up, pre-heat the oven to 160 °C (150 °C fan assisted).
10. Take one frozen dough sheet at a time, place on a baking sheet and remove the top baking paper and set it aside.
11. Bake for 8 minutes, then take out, cover with the saved baking paper and flip over onto it. Slide the baking sheet underneath and bake for a further 4 minutes.
12. Once out of the oven, quickly cut into pieces and transfer to a wire rack to cool down. Repeat with the second dough sheet.

I cut the first frozen dough sheet into diamonds before I baked it, but the lines flowed together during the baking, so I didn't bother doing this on the second sheet. Of course you could pre-cut the pieces and transfer to new baking sheets with space between them.

In the Danish Bake-Off, these biscuits were a bit paler than mine and also didn't bubble up as much as mine. I'm not sure why, perhaps the amounts of cinnamon and baking powder should be reduced. It wasn't very clearly shown in the episode either, however, the result was very nice, particularly when it was still warm out of the oven - wonderfully chewy, but crispy. The following day, the thins had hardened a bit and would work very nicely together with ice cream. If so, they should perhaps be cut in long, narrow strips instead. Keep in an airtight container, if the air is damp like in the UK.

Lundulph's verdict on both these and the lemon sandwich biscuits was that there should have been more left for us, not just a small taster. I guess, I'll have to make some more...