Inspired by Patch’s post where she talks of the problem of flapjacks coming out crumbly or too hard and chewy and remembering that my flapjacks of the past had often been on the hard side, I decided to try and make the perfect flapjack.
Now in my youth, when I was in my convent grammar school, I had ended up studying ‘O’ level Cookery because I wasn’t very good at French and we had had to buy a standard cookery book which contained a recipe for flapjacks which was the one I used.
Here you can see that it has suffered rather from being much used over the intervening years.
And here is the recipe.
I always felt that part of the problem with the flapjacks being so hard was that they were cooked for an hour at a low temperature, so I decided to look and see if I had any other recipes that were different in any way.
Another cookery book that I have had for a long time was given to me by a school friend (with an eye to when I was married, I think!) and I use it for certain recipes but not flapjacks.
The recipe in here was as follows.
I could see that this recipe had relatively more fat and was cooked at a higher temperature for less time so I decided to try it.
Remembering my earlier post about Sultana Oat cookies and the things that made them thick and soft as opposed to thin and crisp, I decided to use what I had learned in reverse and so use margarine instead of butter
and the broken up sort of oats rather than the more whole looking ones.
So having decided what to do I lined a swiss roll tin with a piece of old foil.
and gathered my ingredients.
I melted 6oz of margarine, 30z of demerera sugar and 3 tablespoons of golden syrup in a large saucepan
and added
8oz of oats.
I also picked out a handfull of dried apricots to put in one half of the mixture.
I spread the two mixtures out in the swiss roll tin (chopped up apricot in the part on the left)
and put them in the oven to cook.
As my oven is a Fan Oven I chose to cook them at 170deg C for 20 minutes.
After this time the edges were just beginning to colour so I decided that would be enough
and took them out and marked out sixteen pieces as instructed and left them to cool.
Now I had made a BIG mistake in thinking that a piece of foil would do instead of greasing the tin (and I should have known better. 😦 )
So I had terrible problems trying to get them out of the tin as the foil had stuck to the tin even more than it had stuck to the flapjacks.
And I was left with a bowl of crumbs and these that seemed worth laying out
The only thing to do was to sit down and try a couple with a mug of coffee.
Well! I can report that they are not hard or overly chewy but they are definitely crumbly.
Maybe next time I will stick to my Oat cookie recipe. Perhaps the flour and milk helps them hold together. And by choosing my ingredients, I can make a thicker softer more similar to flapjacks cookie if I want.
I love Flapjacks as well 🙂 One of the best cookies there is 🙂 I have a very nice recipe on them if u want to try them out.
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But do they hold together well without being hard on your teeth?
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Yes they are perfect every time I do them. Never had any problems with them. 🙂 http://dinnerbank.com/2013/10/30/glasgow-flapjacks/
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They look interesting. Must try them sometime. 🙂
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Looks exceedingly yummy. Oh show them the anchovy fingers!
Best wishes,
James (trained anchovy finger tester)
xx
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Anchovy fingers? I haven’t made anchovy fingers. I like anchovies though! Do you have a recipe?
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Try this recipe, bet it’s a goodie:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/flapjacks_86993
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Will go and look!
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Glad it’s not just me that has these problems. The search for will continue eh?
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No! Always found flapjacks tricky. As I said in the post, the recipe I have for oat cookies that has flour in as well as oats but is otherwise similar might give a firmer ‘flapjack’ if made in a tin. Going to try sometime just for interest but have to eat up present crumbly batch first. 🙂
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