pieces of the people we love

i can't really determine whether the extent of my sweet tooth is evident through my posts on this blog or not, as it seems like my posts are split fairly evenly between baking and 'proper cooking'. i'll just clarify, now, in case: my sweet tooth is monumental. it has been ever since i was little. the only person i have ever met who had one to rival it was my late grandfather, geoff slipper, who probably actually initiated mine when i was really little, being in the habit of buying me a 20p mix-up when we used to go and get his copy of the sunday telegraph, which, as family lore would have it, he then had me read to him on his lap, answering all my questions about the phrases and words i didn't know. apparently my capacity for pronouncing foreign politicians names, and grasping the concepts of things like what the cabinet was, other than a cupboard, at an age which seems to mythically get younger in every retelling over the years, was the catalyst for being singled out as the 'Clever One' in my generation of the family. hard as i've worked over the years to rid myself of the title, it firmly stuck, as did the habit of sugar-fuelling myself when reading or writing.

in fact, any given post of mine you care to read was probably constructed whilst consuming something sweet. not a week goes by at casa mitchell where i don't bake something sugary. i'd love to play this off on you as some kind of domestic goddessery, part of a smug, almost housewifely lifestyle in which my days run by meticulously planned routine, but it's actually motivated most of all by sheer greed. i bake so i can eat, no more, no less.

i think the only other shaping factor in what and when i bake is laziness (painting a really pretty picture of myself here, aren't i?). i do not go out and buy one ingredient for a recipe i have looked up. i eiher find a different recipe to make, or subsitute what i do have. why? because it means that a) very little food gets wasted in my kitchen, and b) i don't have to waste time in my day visiting one of northampton's many big box supermarkets/convenience mini versions. in terms of supermarket visitation, i find once a week to be irritation enough, and would far rather not join the culture of people who visit them near-daily. i think perhaps this is another trait i inherited from my grandfather, who was cursing tesco and their market monopoly even in his last days.

so, more often than not, what i choose to bake is dictated by ingredients i have in the house. and that's exactly what happened in the case of these biscuits, a recipe i found in nigel slater's tender volume II, that explicitly states a substitution that should be made rather than going to any great lengths to source a specialist ingredient (or in other, plainer words, he tells you not to stress yourself out over going out to buy stuff, which is pretty much why he's up there on my food heroes list):

walnut not-quite-maple sugar biscuits

makes about 30

maple sugar - 80g, plus a little for dusting (this is the ingredient that you can sub, slater suggests light brown sugar, i suggest the same, but i had a bottle of maple syrup that was gifted to me by a canadian relative at the time of my grandfather's death, so i added a few glugs of that, too)
salted butter - 150g, cut into cubes
a large egg
self-raising flour - 75g
ground almonds -100g
shelled walnuts - 75g
dried cranberries - 75g

set the oven at 190 degrees c/gas 5. put the sugar, butter, and egg into a mixing bowl and cream together until quite smooth. you don't really need to be terribly through about this, but even so you will find a hand-held electric mixer much less trouble than doing it with a wooden spoon. stir in the flour and ground almonds, roughly chop the walnuts and add those along with the dried cranberries, folding them in with a spoon until everything is well mixed.

take walnut sized lumps of the mixture in your fingers and roll them gently in a little more maple sugar, then place them on a non stick baking sheet, pushing them down gently with the back of a spoon. they will be all the more interesting for being left knobbly and rough hewn. a centimetre on each side of them will allow them to spread without touching the next. bake for ten to twelve minutes, then remove and leave to cool a little before transferring carefully to a cooling rack.

so there we have it, lots of lovely little biscuits:



and given how many walnuts and dried cranberries i still have here at casa mitchell after getting them from work when they'd hit their use by date, it's highly likely that batches of these little babies will be popping up with a certain regularity. they were really good, in the way that i find only homemade biscuits can be, nothing else striking the right buttery note for me, nothing else negotiating the balance between crunchy and soft in the same way. my addition of the maple syrup was a good call, not affecting the recipe in any way but bringing in a smoky note that would otherwise have been lacking. slater says you can freeze these if you don't think you can manage thirty, but a) i probably could, singlehandedly, over the course of a few days, and b) nigel slater doesn't also have a family of huge appetites milling around the kitchn waiting for baked goods to appear.i ate this mid-morning, mid-afternoon, hell, even mid-night when i got in from work. these are bisuits that my grandfather and i would have fought over while reading the papers, even if i do read the guardian, in paperless form, something he roundly mocked me for at regular opportunity for most of my adult life. it may be a year since he stopped being a part of my day-to-day, but i still think of him and our newspaper and sugar sessions whenever i make something like this and sit down to read, especially when i catch myself mid-focused-frown and remember the way he used to laugh at the intensity of my concentration even when i was little. i can't help but think a lot about how things and people don't leave you, and the ways in which they stay; and i can't help but think about it most when i'm in the kitchen.