Orchard Training Cookery Club - Nut Biscuit Bake Off

This weekend we had a nut bake-off. I forgot to add a recipe into Year 9’s support materials. All the other year groups had a recipe for Walnut Day, which is being celebrated this week. When the missing recipe was discovered, we had an emergency look at the BBC Good Food recipe bank as we all had access to the same one reference point. We could have baked coffee and walnut cake this week as we are looking at the coffee as a product, but our focus was actually on alternatives to coffee – so it was a no! It was also a no as one of our bakers pointed out they didn’t want to bake a coffee and walnut cake just because that was the only recipe for walnuts. Then we stumbled across Mary Berry’s Melt-in-the-mouth Walnut and Cheese biscuit. We also found Mary Berry’s snowball biscuits using almonds, and so we decided to do biscuits, which was a good idea as Hazelnut Day is coming and National Biscuit Day is also this month. It was then decided that we would bake six different nut biscuits and make comparisons.

We started with Cherry and Brazil Nut Biscuits. I have a basic recipe in my collection which allows you to choose the fruit and nut to your liking, so that was our choice, and as we had a small batch of crystallised cherries from the Orchard Training Homeschool Garden, which we had preserved leftover from last year, we used them then. The considered judgment was that we could taste both the cherry and Brazil nuts, so this was a success.

The next recipe was the Almond Snow Balls. These were easy to make, but the rolling into balls was tricky; you need two pairs of hands. One wet spooning out the mixture and roughly making into a ball. Then dropping this into the icing sugar. The second pair of hands needs to then stay dry, taking them out of the icing sugar and rolling the balls into a good round shape, putting them on the baking tray.

The third recipe was the Walnut and Cheese savoury biscuits. From the start of the preparation process, it became clear this was going to be a very popular recipe. It turns out the whole group are cheese lovers! The smell of these in the oven was amazing, and the eating of them— both warm and cold— was enthusiastically enjoyed. The poppy seeds made the texture, although they were a bit tricky to coat the dough in. We also tried it with whipped feta (which had a mixed review we are not sure about the whipped bit.)

We moved then on to the two peanut biscuits. Here we were able to compare the two biscuits directly against each other. The first was Annie Rigg’s Flourless Peanut Butter Cookie and the second was an old recipe I had already from an American friend of mine. Both were very peanuty. However, Annie Rigg’s beat my recipe hands down. The Flourless Peanut Butter Cookie looked just like the photo – always a good start! We loved the crunchy outside and soft chewy middle.

When we looked at why – we thought we had made the balls too big, we could have flattened them down a lot more and they could have done with being dipped in dark chocolate.

The last biscuit was another direct comparison. It was my American friend’s peanut recipe, but we swapped the white flour for wholemeal flour and the crunchy peanut butter for smooth cashew nut butter. We added some chopped cashews in to makeup the volume. We also made these a lot smaller with a teaspoon rather than a dessert spoon, and topped them with a half crescent of a cashew nut. The size really did make them a nicer eat, but the cashew was somewhat bland, and we talked about which spice we might want to add to improve this adaptation.

By the end of the nut bake off we were defiantly all biscuited out!