Our apologies that the recipe is a day late this week, or rather his. It is not my problem that he had a virus on his computer, it came from Russia but not with love he says.
So the recipe this week is winter or Christmas biscuits. Now a lot of people are surprised to find that we do have a winter on Crete, for instance today the maximum temperature is 12C, which is a lot colder than you get in August, so this recipe contains some of the traditional winter warmer spices as used throughout most northern European countries!
I gave you the ingredients last week, but I have given them to you again below. Note that you are using a whole kilo of flour so you are going to get quite a few biscuits, enough for yourself and to give away to friends as well, but of course you could always make a half quantity if you wished.
Method
Sift the flour, cinnamon, ground clove (or mixed spices) and sugar together with the baking powder, and stir in the grated orange peel, and the candied peel.
Make a hole in the middle as if you were making cement (!), and put in the honey and eggs, the butter, slightly melted and the almonds. Gradually combine all the ingredients into a soft dough.
Ingredients
1 kg flour
Half kilo honey
2 cups sugar
1 cup candied fruit (sometime called mixed peel, it is candied orange and lemon peel)
Grated rind of 3 oranges
1 teaspoon each ground cinnamon and cloves, or 2 teaspoons mixed ground spice
1 tablespoon Baking Powder (not SODA)
1 cup toasted chopped almonds
2 tablespoons butter
2 eggs
Let the mixture stand for a while, about 30 minutes to one hour.
Now as you have got quite a lot of mixture, a big bowlful in fact! Divide it into smaller amounts and then roll it out into a sheet about 5mm or quarter inch thick. You would need a very big area to roll out the whole lot in one go!
You can cut the mixture into any shape you want really using a cookie cutter, but nothing too big because these are quite rich, traditionally this sort of biscuit is made into a longish oval, by hand,say about 2 to 3 cm long and 1 to 1.5 cm wide at the middle, but my paws are not good at this so I use a cookie cutter.
Bake for about 10 minutes in a moderate oven, use the off cuts as test pieces, they should be quite crumbly when cooked.
Delicious!
This is me, Ralfa. Aren't I just gorgeous?