Skip to main content

An attempt at butter biscuits


If you are like me, the one thing that you cannot resist is a late-night-hot cuppa tea with beautiful butter biscuits from one of the street vendors, especially when you are travelling. When I was little, we used to go on long distance buses pretty often and the thing that I would always get when the bus makes a stop is hot milky chai and at least four of those salty butter biscuits. I have grown up with the flavour of these biscuits. And today I have attempted to recreate the flavour, thanks to the recipe for benne biscuits from the Foodie's Hope blog. I have modified some of the amounts in an attempt to make the biscuits a bit more salty.

How to make them
1. Sift 1 cup plain/all purpose/Maida flour, 1/4 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp of salt.
2. Cream 1/2 cup softened Butter and about 1/3 cup white Sugar until creamy and fluffy (I used a less than 1/3 cup plus 2 teaspoons of sugar, well it was probably closer to half a cup!).
3. Add in the flour mix little by little to make a soft dough, not sticky. Preheat the oven to 350C
4. Make about 12-14 balls lightly rolling on your palm,flatten a bit on top. Do not press too hard. (My mom sort of did this her way)
5. Place them on baking sheet 2" apart (I used a greased baking sheet)
6. Place the sheet in the oven and bake for 10-15mins or until very slightly golden but they must remain almost white when done.
7. Cool on a rack, and enjoy!!

So, except for the burnt underside of these cookies, they tasted yum! It was slightly harder than the cookies sold at those tea-stalls, so may be next time I think I will increase the fat content. These cookies are not particularly healthy but who says indulgence is wrong anyway?! Can't believe my dad liked it.
Today when it is snowing here (yeah yet again!), nothing seems more satisfying than a cup of hot madras filter coffee with one or two of those warm salty delights.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Gingerbread house

Oh the warm smell of spices is the hallmark of the holiday season and is the one thing we all love, don't we? GInger is definitely one spice that I love to include in my cooking/baking expeditions during this time of the year. So I was naturally happy to see that this month we were doing the gingerbread house for this month's challenge, well it was a fleeting moment anyway until I realized that it was yet another kitchen mishap. Consider this my 10th new recipe and the 3rd in Nupur's marathon . The December 2009 Daring Baker's challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi . They chose to challenge Daring Bakers' everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book  as the challenge recipes. I used Y's recipe Ingredients 1 cup butter, room temperature 1 cup brown sugar, well packed 2 tablespoons cinnamon 4 teaspoons ground g...

Vadas- not your ordinary ones

I know, I know- I have been out of the blog-land, troubles of this world have me taken over you see and I need to fix it all for me to get back to y'all! Here is a gorgeous looking and perhaps amazingly tasty vada- it was my mum and my experiment all the way to fruition. Now I think kala or kabuli chana is the one of most underused forms of the fabacae family (compare to its ever popular cousin-chickpea). I love kabuli chana especially in what we call sundal from the Tam-land. If you have never tried sundal made of these babies, you must and I insist. But for now I settled for this minor experiment in the kitchen- kabuli chana vadas. Ingredients: Kabuli chana, 1 cup soaked overnight in 2 cups water 1/2 onion, chopped 1 tsp cumin seeds 1 tsp fennel seeds salt and ground red chilli powder to taste Oil for Method: Just like any dal vada- coarsely grind the softened chana (Note: this is not going to have a lot of binding capacity) Mix in the onions, salt, red chilli powder, cu...

Tried and Tasted- hell yeah!

I love a lot of the food blogs and eventually I begin to love the food bloggers themselves for their creativity. One such food blogger is Raaga- The Singing Chef. She has a lovely blog filled with wonderful recipes and stories. When Divya announced that Raaga's blog is being featured on Tried  and Tasted , I was thrilled and I had to make something from her blog. I chose a rice dish for a simple reason that Raaga puts it best herself "Pulaos are multipurpose dishes. They are showstoppers at parties, timesavers on weekend and lifesavers during weekday lunches." Cauliflower peas pulao from her blog Ingredients:  2 cup Basmati Rice 1 cup Peas 2 cup Cauliflower florets Salt to Taste 1-2 tbsp Oil ¼ tsp Asafoetida 1” stick Cinnamon 3 Cloves Masala (Grind to a Paste):   3 tbsp frozen Coconut, thawed 1 1/2 cup Coriander Leaves 3 Green chillies 1" piece Ginger 3 pods Garlic 1 medium Onion, roughly chopped 1” stick Cinnamon 3 Cloves  1 tbsp Khus-Khus, soak...