ANZAC Bickies

Yesterday was ANZAC Day, and I thought I’d celebrate a day off in the middle of the week not by going the traditional dawn parade but by a) sleeping in and b) making some ANZAC biscuits and then going to the beach.

The story behind these is that the WWI women at home in Australia and New Zealand would make them to send to the soldiers overseas. I guess they keep well when you put them in a package and send them to Gallipoli by boat. I seem to have lost the online recipe I used, but see if you can make out the written version, complete with crazy metric measurements and Celsius temperature.

First you get together the dry ingredients. Actually I probably wouldn’t even show you this picture, seeing as it’s just a picture of, like, oats, but the lovely Tracy saw it on the “Everyone” photostream on Flickr today, so it is a picture of famous oats.

Oh, and speaking of ingredients, a big major part of ANZAC biscuits is the extraordinarily sweet golden syrup. No golden syrup? No ANZAC biscuits, apparently. No cheating and using molasses or “treacle” or honey or maple syrup or whatever.

Okay, so anyway. Mix up the dry ingredients (you flour, your sugar, your dessicated coconut, and your famous oats) in the bowl you bought specifically to make your Hundred Dollar Birthday Tiramisu but can also be used to mix up cookies.

And then melt the golden syrup (NO CHEATING WITH MOLASSES) and the butter together.

And then you have to dissolve the baking soda in some hot water, and pour it right into the syrup mixture, causing it to foam very entertainingly indeed.

Mix the wet and dry ingredients. I had to add a little water at the end to make an actual dough. Ooh, also? Even though you may be tempted to stick your finger in the foamtastic butter-syrup concoction? Don’t.. It is nice to look at but tastes awful, with the baking soda in there.

So then you get tablespoonsful of the dough and pop them on the baking sheet and then mash them a little with a fork. A. assures me that the forking part is also very integral to the whole thing, so I was very assiduous about that. It’s a good thing, too, because later her mom came up from Wanganui and I was living in fear that she, A.’s mom, whom I like very much, would taste my biscuits and pronounce them inauthentic. “If she doesn’t like them, just don’t tell me,” I implored A. on the way out the door to go to the beach. Fortunately for me, A.’s lovely mother did like them and took the trouble to tell me so this morning, which was very gratifying indeed. I don’t know how it would have gone without the forking, though, so I suggest if you make these you make sure to fork ‘em up assiduously, okay? You don’t want to disappoint anyone’s mom.

Wait, where was I? Oh, right, so you pop them in a 160 Celsius (dude, you do the math) oven for about ten minutes.

(That’s Lester, my new octopus, by the way. Doesn’t he sort of look like a Lester?)

They should come out pretty brown but not crispy. They were soft at first and I wondered if I’d done something wrong but they hardened up pretty quickly when I set them out to cool, which makes them excellent for dipping in tea if you don’t mind getting little bits of oats in the bottom of your mug. Considering they have both golden syrup and sugar in them they’re not as sickly sweet as you’d think they’d be. They’re like a no-dried-fruit granola bar, sort of, but in cookie formation. If you like that sort of thing. I happen to, very much, as did everyone I shared them with, which is why I a) did not get a picture of myself enjoying one and b) can neither confirm nor deny their keepability, as none lasted through the night.

They were very good, I will admit. Combined with lunch at the Maranui Surf Lifesaving Club, a trip to Scorching Bay to see starfish in tidepools, some sitting around watching movies, and a very good bellydance class, it was a pretty perfect way to spend my first ANZAC Day.