Another recipe from Miranda Gore Browne’s Biscuit (Ebury Press 2012). I was a bit disappointed at the finished appearance of these biscuits. The book doesn’t picture them and in fact not all the recipes have a photograph, which is unhelpful, especially as some of the recipes have fairly flamboyant names (Coat-pocket biscuits, Sledging biscuits and Imagination Biscuits, anyone? – to name just 3 for which there is no picture). But having too few pictures is the worse criticism I can throw at a book which has yielded many lovely recipes.
Hazelnut and chocolate chip crumbles (from Miranda Gore Browne’s Biscuit: Ebury Press 2012)
170 g unsalted butter softened
50 g golden caster sugar
50 g muscovado sugar
100 g hazelnuts toasted and chopped
100 g wholemeal flour
100g plain flour
100 g dark chocolate chips
Makes about 24
Preheat oven to 160°C/140°C for a fan oven/Gas Mark 3 and line 2 baking sheets with non-stick baking paper.
Cream butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Add the hazelnuts and also the flour. Mix well until a dough forms. Add the chocolate chips, using a spoon if necessary.
Pinch off pieces of dough and place on the baking sheet. Flatten slightly.
Bake for 20 minutes or until golden – the surface of the biscuit should look dry and cracked. Firm up on baking tray for 5 minutes before removing to a rack to cool.
Miranda grinds some of the hazelnuts to be finer than those from my Waitrose packet of chopped hazelnuts and perhaps this is why my dough remained crumbly and slightly alarming as I tried to shape it into vaguely round shapes for the baking tray. I wondered about adding an egg next time. NEVERTHELESS, the biscuits were delicious and I will be trying them again, possibly half dipped in dark chocolate, rather than with chocolate chips within.
Hazelnut and chocolate chip crumbles (from Miranda Gore Browne’s Biscuit: Ebury Press 2012)
Small triumph – South Oxfordshire Village Quiz League has its first round devoted entirely to KNITTING.
The quiz teams are predominantly male although our team is unusual in regularly fielding 2 or 3 women in the team. Sport is a favourite source of questions but very esoteric rounds on things like dates and venues of football World Cup finals have left even some of the men groaning. (And I say this as one brought up on the cricket fields and rugby pitches of England, whose son regularly opened the batting for London Schools, partnering Alistair Cooke who – not many people know this – was at the time the side’s wicket keeper.)
From time to time, after a particularly dire round I have been known to mutter that the occasional foray into knitting, sewing or haute couture would be nice but I never really expected to see it happen. I am relieved to report that I did not let the side down on this gift of a round and was able to gain welcome extra points by correctly identifying, a small patch of stocking stitch, ditto garter stitch (both beautifully knitted), both Guernsey and Fair Isle jumpers, a needle sizer, a row counter and the use of just one needle for Norwegian jumpers – which all of you reading this could too!
10 Comments
How innovative to have a quiz round devoted to knitting, Mary, and well done you! No, I hadn’t heard of one-needle Norwegian knitting but will investigate right away. Other categories for quiz rounds could be art or gardening or cookery perhaps. As my knowledge of sports, soaps and 70’s pop music could be written on the back of a stamp, I usually add little value as a team member.
Those biscuits look absolutely gorgeous. Love the plate, too. I took a plate of chocolate and hazelnut brownies to a – now – annual music quiz at a friend’s house on Wednesday. It’s primarily a Delia recipe but changing the sugar to Demerara, grinding a few coffee beans to add to the toasted and then finely ground hazelnuts has made the recipe distinctly mine. They were far more successful than my music answers.
Cookery and natural history do occasionally turn up to. Ditto from me groans about soaps, pop music from the 80s on, etc. Once we had 3 rounds on pop music in one quiz (who are these drummers? which pop song ends like this – backwards? – to name just what I remember). Rapidly losing the will to carry one, some of us were reduced to muttering opera, lieder, polyphony, as we sank into utter lethargy…)
Excellent sounding brownies – love the idea of adding ground coffee.
My goodness, what a triumph of a round for you! The preponderance of Sport and Celebrity questions is one reason I’ve always ducked taking part in quizzes. The idea of sitting blankly, not even understanding the question, time after time after time, is just not enticing, and it doesn’t seem fair to have a quarter of the team not contributing because of bewilderment!
I couldn’t agree more Rachel. When we first started these inter village quizzes we did have nights of utter humiliation which was horrible. Once however, winning was even worse as the other side took it so badly – I then realised some of us were better equipped to fail than others – though not all of our team would go along with this. Our team has since evolvled into a jolly, friendly lot who don’t take it too seriously, enjoy a bit of banter and are good at supporting each other – and since then we’ve done better.
The only quiz I participate in is our annual post christmas dinner quiz, which my husband makes up in early December and stashes away in a sealed envelope until christmas day. There are rounds on christmas, general knowledge, films, music etc. much more fun than charades! X
Your quiz sounds civilised in the extreme – well done Derek. My husband’s grandchildren do something similar. The best quizes make you want to know the answers and thereby enrich your knowledge of the world around you. Or the questions are ones you’d like to hazard a guess on just for the fun of it. Over Christmas we played a board game called Logo and got thoroughly involved in thinking about how many Polos there are in a pack. (there are 23 in fact – most of us were out by 10 or more!)
I work in a Sydney bookshop that strongly supports an indigenous literacy foundation – the annual fundraiser for this foundation is a large trivia competition. Attended by lots of publishers, some teachers and librarians, editors, booksellers. Who do you think usually wins? The booksellers. Except when there’s a lot of sport questions.
Will have to google Norwegian knitting, sounds intriguing.
Well done the booksellers. The thought of Trivia quizes usually makes my heart sink – at a school quiz I remember our team moaned bitterly about a round on adverts only to find we’d got full points on it. That was the same quiz at which we were asked to write a limerick OR a haiku on some fine point of educational policy which produced just as many moans from the whole school – but meanwhile an American academic on our team quietly went on and produced both. Oh happy times!
I thin by the Norwegian sweaters the questions were referring to were those favoured by Sarah Lund in ‘The Killing’ – it is in fact a Faroe Isles jumper but nevertheless still worked on one needle.
Firstly, your blog is really lovely, and charming. Thank you.
I sometimes wistfully think about a topsy turvy world where all the hours of television football programmes and all the pages of newspaper sport sections are not about football and sport, but about crochet knitting and embroidery. And peopled by women discussing the latest crochet news and patterns, with phone ins for tips, and free pull outs for new seasonal patterns. Imagine.
A lovely comment, thank you, Jo.
What a pleasant dream – I suppose the trouble is the competitive element is lacking. With the Great British Sew Off (was it called that?) – and I only watched a few – I thought the competitive element rather swamped the skill.