Bak-en-Brou kaskenades

On Saturday night, The Dad, Boobah and myself met up with some friends at Primi Piatti at the Stoneridge Centre, where Boobah spent most of the evening in their Kids' section, which may I add, is a fantastic set-up for little kids. They have a section set up where kids can play and learn about making their own pizzas and use cookie-cutters on pizza dough to cut biscuits. A dedicated member of their staff looks after the kids, and then takes their culinary masterpieces to get baked for the little ones to enjoy. Naturally, Boobah had a blast, and because we were some of the only parents with small kids to frequent the venue on Saturday night, he basically had the space, utensils and helping lady to himself. Together, they made a ton of biscuits.

Then, the following couple of days, all he could talk about were koekies bak*. And he told the story to everybody who cared to listen and could decipher what he was saying; he is only still two and a half, after all. This gave me the idea to actually bake some biscuits. We haven't baked them together, ever, and I haven't baked any in a very long time. The problem is though, that I don't particularly own cookbooks. My mum has plenty and so does my Gran, but I have never really bought myself a cookbook. So I spent the whole day Wednesday on the net looking for cookie recipes. But there was a slight catch. I was looking for the recipes in Afrikaans. Not because I don't understand English baking terms, but that was the best way to ensure that all the ingredients we would require, are locally available. American recipes tend to contain a lot of stuff that we can't get here and I didn't want to spend a fortune on locating said ingredients, or finding substitutes. Luckily, when I mentioned to my mum what I was planning, she pulled through, grabbed her Huisgenoot Wenresepte (Book 4, I think), scanned the exact recipe for the biscuits I wanted to bake, but couldn't find ANYWHERE on the interwebs, and promptly mailed it to me. Thanks Muvver, you are my hero!

Boy, did we have a blast last night! Boobah helped me from getting all the ingredients together, to helping me sift the flour, and only ran away once, when I used the Raas-maak-ding (the electric mixer) to cream the eggs, butter and sugar together. He hates that thing and is scared to death of it. He was so excited at the prospect of baking biscuits, that at one stage, he didn't even want to make some space or give me time to roll out the dough on the counter top so that we could ACTUALLY make the biscuits. It was great fun though and we ended up making a whole variety of different biscuits. The recipe states that the dough is enough for 160 biscuits… Goeie genade!** For variety, we made plain biscuits, coconut biscuits, coconut and strawberry jam ones, plain strawberry jam ones, ones with chocolate sprinkles in them (because I couldn't find chocolate chips at the two stores we went to) and chocolate stars biscuits, with peppermint flavor, for a nice Christmassy effect. Although, to be honest, the peppermint flavor didn't come through all that well. Actually, it didn't come through at all. Maybe I put in too little, or it disappeared during the baking process or something. But nevertheless, those stars are my second favorite biscuits out of all the ones we made. The strawberry jam and coconut ones are my favoritest ones!

Here's some photos of my star baker, and the baking process:

Mixing the flour

Making biscuits

(I know the face is dirty, but we did wash hands before we started)

On the baking tray

Jam Biscuits - the best ones

The Dad's lunch biscuits

And here's the recipe, translated from Afrikaans, for anyone else who may be interested in baking nice homemade biscuits this holiday season:

"Outydse Soetkoekies" – Way back when, Old Time Favorite Biscuits, like your Granny used to make them

250g butter or margarine – at room temperature

600g (750ml / 3 cups) sugar

5 large eggs

800g ( 6 x 250ml, measured before you sift it) cake flour

30ml baking powder

10ml powdered nutmeg **ßOptional, I left this one out, because I wanted to make such a variety of flavored biscuits**

2ml salt

Decoration:

1 egg, beaten

25ml milk

Sugar

Cream the butter/margarine, sugar and eggs together in a biggish bowl. Sift the cake flour, baking powder, nutmeg and salt together, sommer straight on top of the creamed butter mixture in the bowl. Mix everything together until a nice, soft dough forms. Now cover it, and leave it to rest for half an hour. (I'm not sure why, but the recipe says so).

Preheat the oven to 200 °C (400 °F). Coat your baking trays with butter/margarine or spray them liberally with Spray 'n Cook.

At this point, we took handfuls of cookie dough, and started adding all our extra bits and stuff like coconut or chocolate sprinkles or cocoa powder (I don't know how much cocoa powder I used, I just took a big spoon and added heaps of it to the dough until I thought that it looked like enough) and worked it into the dough.

Roll the dough out on a flat surface that was dusted with some more flour, and dust the rolling pin also, it really helps. Keep rolling until the dough is about 5mm thick. Now proceed to use your most interesting cookie cutters to cut really cool shaped cookies and place them spaced evenly on the baking tray. This is not a runny dough, so the shapes hold well, and the chances of them merging on the tray are minimal. Unless, of course, you stack them on top of each other – not a grand idea.

If you're making plain biscuits only, for the decoration bit, mix the beaten egg and milk together in a cup or small bowl, then brush this lightly on top of the biscuits on your tray. Now sprinkle sugar on each biscuit, shove the tray in the oven for about 10 minutes, or until the biscuits are golden brown. Take them out, leave to cool slightly in the pan, then transfer the biscuits to a cooling rack.

Store biscuits in an airtight container. Get a huge one, because there will be a LOT of biscuits!

Have lots of fun in between J

And oh yes, just a short mention, if you have a double element oven, just use the bottom element to bake these biscuits, or they will burn. And that's yucky, when the outside is burnt, but the inside still half uncooked.

*baking biscuits

**Good Grief!