Cooking with Carob, part 3: Carob Biscuits

There are two types here, both given a really distinctive flavour, and colour with the addition of Carob powder.

Carob, Hazelnut & Raisin biscuits & Carob Lemon & Ginger biscuits

Both are gluten free so the biscuits are much softer in texture than you’re “usual” biscuit.   Some gluten free flour blends will give you a biscuit that’s more brittle, and certainly, shop bought gluten free biscuits are like that. However, I’ve gone for simple ingredients which makes them a bit harder to handle when cooking.

Carob, Hazelnut & Raisin

Ingredients

• 150 g rice flour
• 150 g ground almonds
• 40 g carob powder
• 200 g butter
• 100 g Demerara sugar
• 80 g raisins
• 100 g toasted, chopped hazelnuts.

Method

Weigh and mix the flour, ground almonds and the carob powder

Add the sugar, making sure you’ve got rid of all the lumps of sugar that may have formed in the packet.     Next add the hazelnuts and raisins and mix them up thoroughly

Soften the butter and mix it really well into the mixture.

Gently pat the resulting biscuit mixture into a flan tin or silicone bakeware, just as you would with flapjack.  It is too soft to roll and cut into biscuit shapes.  I use a tin ***** cm in diameter and that makes the “biscuits” about 2cm thick, so a cross between a bar and a biscuit really.

Bake at gas mark 4 (180 degrees C / 350 degrees F) for about 25 minutes.

Leave the cooked mixture in  the tin until it has cooled before you cut it into pieces.     The finished article will be soft and break up fairly naturally into pieces so they may not all end up the same size or very biscuit shaped but it is a good way to manage gluten free mixture.   You’ll also have lots of crumbs left over.  But they still taste just as nice!

Carob, Lemon and Ginger Biscuits

Ingredients

• 200g rice flour
• 30g carob powder
• 150g lemon curd
• 75g finely chopped stem ginger
• 50g butter

Method

Mix the flour with carob powder and then add the lemon curd

Mix in the stem ginger

Soften the butter and mix it thoroughly into the biscuit mixture.  There is much less butter this time because there is less flour and because the lemon curd will help to bind the mixture.

Once again, pat the mixture into a flan tin, or another kind of bakeware which lets you get the mixture about 2cm thick.

Bake at gas mark 4 (180 degrees C / 350 degrees F) for about 20 minutes

Leave to cool and then cut into pieces and lift it out of the cooking container.