Every so often, if I am feeling tired and sluggish for no discernible reason, I take a little break from wheat, but as you can imagine this is not easy considering a) I bake for a living and b) how much I really really love cake!
So after mainlining wheat based baked goods for a prolonged period I decided to step away from the flour. I knew that this would be too hard to do without a stash of wheat-free goodies for me to turn to if I needed some of the good stuff. So I created these little biscuits to be my guilty pleasure (when the kidlets weren't looking.) I made them with wheat-free flour, which I actually really like, it has more of a gritty texture than normal flour and can feel drier in the mouth, but married with a delicious ganache filling they were perfect. Of course you can make them with a wheat based flour if you prefer and they would be just as yummy. I had to sample the biscuits as soon as they came out of the oven (naturally) and they were delicious, they would be perfect with a cup of tea or coffee in their naked state, but dressed with a dollop of figgy jam and some ganache they are quite scrumptious.
Place the chopped figs and caster sugar in pan and heat gently until the sugar has dissolved, bring to the boil and then simmer until it forms a jam (104C/220F.) If you don't have a sugar thermometer, when you think the jam has nearly set take the pan off the heat, then put a teaspoonful of the jam onto a saucer and place in the fridge, after a couple of minutes take it out, push the surface of the jam, if you can see wrinkling then the jam is set (if it is not ready then simmer for five minutes and try again.)
Put the remaining ingredients into a bowl and rub them together with your fingers until they form a dough. Pat the dough into a flat cake shape, cover it with kitchen film and place in the fridge for at least an hour.
Roll the dough out to a depth of 3-4cm.
Cut out the biscuits with a circle cutter measuring roughly 5cm, and place them on a lined baking tray.
Bake in a preheated oven 200C for ten minutes or until they are golden brown around the edges.
The unfilled cookies can be stored in a tin for up to a week and will remain perfectly crisp.
(I'd like to point out that my fingers are not injured but just covered in food colours)
Melt 100g of good quality dark chocolate, then add 50ml of boiling water. Beat together until they have combined and leave the ganache to cool slightly.
Put the ganache into a piping bag. Place a small dollop of the fig jam in the middle of a biscuit. Pipe the ganache around the edge of the biscuit. Then gently press another cookie on top.
The finished cookies need to be eaten on day you fill them, although they will last longer if you forgo the figgy jam and just use ganache as a filling.
You can download the recipe by clicking on the arrow in the picture above, or click on the printer to print out the pdf.
I hope that you will enjoy these biscuits as much as I did (I pretty much ate the whole batch myself!)
xxx
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