This recipe was adapted from the BBC Good Food website and it originally included white chocolate. Quite a nice biscuit though, but not outstanding, I should probably have added the 85g of white chocolate chips the recipe recommended – or perhaps I could have added a mashed banana as we are very fond of bananas and custard.
Custard biscuits
140 g butter cubed
175 g caster sugar
1 egg
1/2 teasp vanilla extract
225 g self-raising flour
85 g custard powder
Heat oven to 180°/ 160° for fan oven/Gas Mark 4
Line 3 baking sheets with baking parchment.
Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add egg and vanilla and beat well. Sift in the flour and custard powder and mix until a dough forms.
Roll the dough into little balls, about the size of walnuts and place about 3cm apart on the baking tray, giving them a little press to flatten.
Bake for about 12 minutes until very lightly golden. Remove and cool on a wire rack.
Custard biscuits
Garden birds are very low key at the moment – they are presumably shivering in the trees as the weather refuses to get much warmer. As if in compensation, larger birds have been more high profile. A local pheasant and his wife strut up and down the road and parade in and out of the back gardens and nascent wheat field beyond. In general pheasants seem rather unintelligent birds, but this couple have obviously worked out that when there’s a shoot nearby, sticking near to houses is a good idea. From time to time the male knocks on the glass door with his beak, perhaps to enquire whether we have seen their egg(s). The vicar had in fact spotted an egg in the flower bed by the back door. At first we thought it was one left over from the Easter egg hunt whose chocolate had turned lighter in the rain and odd hours of sun, but a bit of research has revealed it to be a pheasant egg abandoned or unsuccessfully sat upon. Having just been reading Jemima Puddleduck to the small person, I fear the female pheasant too may be a poor sitter.
At the same time, the front lawn has been the occasional resting place of three Mallard ducks – two drakes and a female – all very companionable and no fighting. But this year there has been no sign of the swans in the oil seed rape where they sit, twenty or thirty together as if they’ve mistaken the ploughed and planted furrows for a the eddies of river water. Curious about this, a little delving reveals that the swans are having a feeding stop over on their migration path and, being grazing animals just like rabbits, cows or deer (just like?), they are quite simply making the most of an easily accessible salad plate.
6 Comments
Pheasants do seem to be stupid birds. I’ve found myself braking to a stop to avoid squishing two males who were too busy facing off to notice a ton of metal not five foot away!
Yes, they’re a real hazard round here – just as sea gulls seem to be in St Ives. My daughter did run a pheasant over on a busy road on her way to St Ives as it would have been more dangerous to suddenly break – it was most distressing. The roadside from here to Cornwall was noticeably littered with dead pheasants – and double figures of dead badgers – I’ don’t think I’ve ever seen so much road kill.
These are very nice biscuits to look at, Mary, and instinctively offer a nostalgic, satisfying sense of warmth and comfort as if to say, “I’m a proper old-fashioned biscuit with none of yer new-fangled bits and pieces stuck inside me.”
Our almost-resident pheasant was named Elvis by the granddaughters a few years ago, and of course his wife is Priscilla although we haven’t seen her about for some time. Various grasses, planted for their statuesque elegance, and just as they are about to come into the phase where they offer a pleasing architectural significance to the house, possibly increasing its market value, are flattened into a feeble lump of nothingness by Elvis who uses them to rest and roost.
Thank you about the biscuits, Penny. They do look remarkably uniform.
We’ve never thought of naming our pheasant even though he’s been strutting in and out of our garden for some years – how unimaginative of us. Fortunately if they flatten anything they tend to chose the field rather than our garden to do it in.
Delicious lookimg biscuits Mary. I like biscuits made with custard powder, such a distinctive flavour. X
It is quite distinctive, isn’t it – don’t you think you can taste the maize in it, or am I imagining this having read the label? My husband liked them.