A poorly boy, a sulking dog, a minor attack of recipe rage - but LOVELY biscuits

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It hasn’t been a happy day in the Recipe Junkie household. The beautiful crisp winter weather we had for the last couple of days turned into horrible damp drizzle. Yes, it’s warmer, but the greyness does nothing for my soul. Blue has been off school, which is not in itself a drama, but having felt this morning that I was probably just giving him the benefit of the doubt, by keeping him off, I had to send him to bed this evening with a temperature of 38.7, knowing full well that he won’t be able to go on his school trip tomorrow. He’s supposed to be going to the British Museum to see the Egyptian things, and he has just been dying to go, counting down the days since before Christmas. I feel so sorry for him – he will just be gutted. I think secretly he knew, but I didn’t dwell on it this evening. I’ll leave that joy for the morning.

As a result of Blue being poorly, Fred the dog is barely speaking to me, having only had the shortest of walks, on the lead, to take Pink to school and then to pick her up. I see him lying there – hardly deigning to raise an eyebrow- simmering with the injustice of it all. I took a picture of him – don’t be fooled into thinking that he’s asleep. He’s not – he’s just sulking.

Pink’s got the back to school blues – you know the ones where they’ve been excited to go back to school to see all their friends, the activities have started back up again (ballet, Rainbows), and then the realisation that this is it for however many weeks, with only the brief respite of half term to look forward to – and the Husband hadn’t had a great day at work. Even the planned supper didn’t work out – no one felt like eggs so instead of Chachouka, we had pasta with the pepper & tomato stew as a sauce.

So guess what? I did some baking. It was a necessity really. I’m embarrassed to say that we had finished off the weekend baking (bar 2 slices of the chocolate cake) by lunchtime today, and the empty tins were making me twitchy. Having felt a bit let down by my failure to miraculously produce wonderful wholemeal bread by following Dan Lepard’s recipe, Dan’s back in my good books, despite a little recipe rage, which I will come to later, with his spelt and ginger cookies. With all this cake stuff, it’s easy to forget that biscuits can take no time at all, and be totally scrummy. These are no exception – the dough takes hardly anytime at all and the only slightly tricky thing is separating an egg. I thought I might make meringues with the white, but it’s hardly worth it for just one white so I decided to freeze the white, I have done this many times before – but this time it was different. This time, I remembered to date the plastic tub and also label it with the number of egg whites I’d put in. So that hopefully, when I have another white or 2, I can add them to the tub and either update the number of whites, or be confident in how many I have altogether with which to make some meringues. I can’t tell you the number of times I have ended up having to chuck frozen egg whites out because I have no idea how many are in the tub.

But back to the biscuits. So you make the dough, and he’s very precise about how big each lump of dough should be – he qualifies ‘a teaspoon’ to be about 15g – that you put on the baking sheet. So, as you can probably tell from my revelation about the egg whites, I’m not necessarily a careful cook, but I thought, “Tonight, let’s go that extra mile, and let’s just check how much these bad boys are weighing” (oh yes, it’s rock and roll at our house, I tell you). So rather unusually, I used pretty much the right amount of dough for each biscuit. Some weighed 16 or 17 g, some 13 or 14. So how come, Mr Lepard, I only ended up with 24 biscuits when the recipe states that it will make about 35?? 32 or 33 I could have lived with – but 24?? (and I know what you’re thinking, but no, I did not eat the mixture before I started dividing it up, and no there wasn’t much left for scraping the bowl afterwards). This really irritates me. However, I feel sure I can move on. The biscuits (or cookies are lovely, and look very appetising in my Alessi jar which was looking very empty once I’d moved it from the dresser to pride of place on the new shelf. But now it looks full, and the little man hanging down has something to rest his feet on for a little while – until they all get eaten.