Chewy Biscuits

A few days ago, my Dad sent me a scan of a recipe for Swedish soft, thin bread. This came from the weekly magazine my Mum's been reading for several decades and it struck me, because I recognised the picture. What is going on here? I searched through old cuttings of recipes from the same publication and indeed I found that I already had this recipe, published about 11 years ago. Everything was the same, just some minor changes to the layout. Outrageous!

The good thing about all this is that I riffled through a good part of my recipe collection and spotted a few interesting recipes, which I set aside to action as soon as possible. Here is the first one, as it seemed fairly easy to do.

Ingredients

100 g unsalted butter at room temperature
1 dl granulated sugar
2 tbsp light syrup / golden syrup / runny honey
2½ dl plain flour
½ tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla sugar
100 g milk or dark chocolate with or without nuts

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 175 °C (not fan) and line a large baking sheet with baking paper.
2. Whisk together the butter, sugar and syrup smooth and fluffy.
3. Sift in the flour, baking powder and vanilla sugar and fold together to a homogeneous dough, but don't over-work it.
4. Divide into three equal parts and shape each one into a long sausage, about 2 cm in diameter, and place onto the baking sheet, then gently press down to flatten.
   
5. Carefully grate the chocolate and sprinkle generously over the dough.
6. Bake for about 13 minutes until it starts going golden brown.
7. Remove from the oven, then cut each length with a knife into diagonal biscuits, then carefully transfer onto a cooling rack.
   

These were very nice indeed. Since Ocado have their Scandinavian food section, I have a regular supply of the light syrup, which is so popular in Swedish baking. I actually baked these a bit too long and they went harder than I wanted them once they cooled down. However, Lundulph and I gobbled them up far too quickly.