The Hypnotist’s Love Story by Liane Moriarty is set in Sydney, Australia. It tells the story of a hypnotist, Ellen, and her falling in love and lots of other things like that! Her paramour has a stalker – so that’s good. One day, she (stalker) bakes Ellen (heroine) Anzac Biscuits in Ellen’s kitchen. Yes – a wee bit psycho. Moving along…
Biscuits in this case (Australia) are cookies (America). Tom-ay-to. Tom-ah-to. Etc. Etc. I had been thinking of Anzac biscuits last month. I like to pick a country and make a dish (authentic or not) from there. That day, I tried Cambodia first, and was greeted with an image of a fish’s head in a soup. “I’ll just do Australia, so” – said weak me. I just googled “Australian food” or something.
Anzac = Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. Anzac Day is to Australia and New Zealand as Memorial Day and Poppy Day are to the US and The UK. I don’t know why the cookies, but who am I to ask?
Quote:
She remembered standing in the kitchen, after that strange awful day in the mountains, breathing in the distinctive fragrances of golden syrup and brown sugar, her heart hammering, reminded so strongly of visits when her grandmother was alive. Her grandmother used to make Anzac biscuits all the time.
Preparation:
Being from the other side of the Atlantic (to the US), I am accustomed to biscuits with some of these ingredients. For the three weeks in Secondary School I did Home Economics, we made Black and Gold biscuits with golden syrup and black treacle. They were fantastic. Back to reality…. I couldn’t be arsed getting the real ingredients (golden syrup) because I’ll never use them up! I dithered between using an Australian recipe and subbing American ingredients, and finding an American version of the recipe. I looked around, made an uneducated guess, and made these from Recipe Tin Eats (thank you, Nagi), using some substitutions. It’s an Australian site but Nagi always helps us Yanks out with suggested substitutions and measurements. Sorry. Paddies call all Americans Yanks. Gosh this whole Irish woman living in America cooking Australian biscuits/cookies is getting… Okay. Feck off. On with the show.
Jewel – why do you do me so wrong? No desiccated coconut. They sell three versions/brands of it, but all were sold out. As in empty shelves. The only options were Sweetened Coconut and Macaroon Coconut. The sweetened coconut “only” had 1.5 times the sugar content of the real thing and it resembled the texture of desicated much more than the powder-like Macaroon stuff.
Onto the Golden Syrup… There were lots of suggestions for substiutions, homemade version, and blends. I bought Molasses (couldn’t find light) and Agave Syrup. This is going furthur and furthur away from the recipe…. Eh…
I threw it all together. The smell was glorious. I had so much hope, and the dough was so familiar, similar to my old cookies from years ago.
My take:
So they turned out really flat. I still had hope. It was likely the different ingredients, overmixing, and my physical handling of the dough. It’ll be fine. It was not fine. They were not good. Not horrendous. Just nothing special. Nothing eh. I’ll just stop. I didn’t throw them out, but I put two on a plate to eat and only ate one – so yeah.
Lesson of the day:
If you don’t have most of the ingredients just don’t. I need to track down my Black and Gold biscuit recipe from 35 years ago. My mam probably has it in her kitchen cupboards somewhere…
Note: I have cooked a ton of things from Recipe Tin Eats and have yet to be disappointed. She (Nagi) has a ton of yummy recipes on there. I take 100% blame for how these turned out.
Editing to Add:
These were so much better the next day. I will still use netter ingredients next time but those cookuits or biscies got gobbled right up!
eat-my-books.com 