Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

Butter pecan biscuits with dark milk chocolate

It’s taken nearly a month to get back in the swing of making church biscuits what with being in London for one weekend, the vicar being given a Sunday off for the next and last weekend somebody appearing at the vicarage bearing a covetable tin (pale green, hexagonal, Prince of Wales feathers) full of homemade chocolate cookies. So, a bit rusty, yesterday I set about making these Butter Pecan biscuits which I based on a recipe in Tessa Kiros’s Apples for Jam (Murdoch Books, 2006). Church attendance was likely to be on the low side as St Mary’s Players (the church’s very own thespians) would be recovering from their annual pantomime experience, waking with beards crying out to be shaved off, stage make-up induced dermatitis calling out for cold cream and tight-wearers’ rash begging for hydrocortisone cream. Many of us at church were a bit pantomime bruised too with voices scratchy from shouting for Flossie whenever anybody tried to steal her rapidly flowering pot plant and calling somewhat uncomprehendingly for a squirrel called David Cameron to pop out from a hole in a tree.   (We will laugh at almost anything.) But I only mention the pantomime late sleepers because this is the one day when my biscuits can fail miserably and there will be fewer to witness such failure.

Ingredients

220 g/ 7 3/4 oz butter

70 g/ 2 1/2 ox icing sugar (+ a bit more for dusting)

1 tsp vanilla extract

100 g / 3 1/2 oz crushed pecans

250g / 9 oz plain flour (I use 100g wholemeal + the rest plain white flour)

100 g/ 3 1/2 oz chocolate (I used a dark milk chocolate bar)

This recipe makes 30-40 biscuits (depending upon size).

Preheat oven to 190 degrees C/ 170 degrees C for a fan oven/Gas Mark 5

Use non stick baking trays which won’t need lining with baking parchment because, hooray, these biscuits are v. short and come away from the tray easily.

Cream butter, sugar and vanilla essence until smooth. Add the flour gradually and then the nuts.

Divide the dough in 4 and from each of these quarters, with fingers dipped in the extra icing sugar, pinch off ten little pieces and roll them into a ball. (I always panic a bit at this point because if you roll the ball too much it starts to break up – but never fear, experience tells me you can press the crumbling nugget back into shape.) Once on the baking tray, flatten the biscuits a little.

Bake for about 15 minutes. Transfer biscuits to a cooling rack (they might be a bit soft and crumbly but they firm up on cooling).

When fully cool, put the broken up chocolate piece in a bowl over a pan of just below boiling water (taking care the bottom of the dish is not touching the water). When chocolate melted, dip biscuits in until half covered. Return to cooling tray.

Pecans gave a subtly different taste from ground almonds, which I love and rarely make biscuits without. As the pecans were bashed rather than ground the texture was also more robust. It might be fun to try ground walnuts another time, although walnuts can be a bit bitter and dry.

But the biscuits were v. good – so good they reminded me of those I had at tea in the Savoy with an American friend before Christmas. I’ve never had tea at the Savoy before but she was staying there, so we went straight from lunch in the National Gallery Restaurant to tea in the Savoy just for the fun of it, and to ensure minimum break in our conversation. And we did only order tea – (well we were still eating lunch under an hour before!) – but with the tea came 4 different little almondy, shortcakey, part chocolatey biscuits of the utmost deliciousness and refinement.  Greed overcame us. My biscuits tasted similar, but in appearance were country clodhoppers to the kitten-heeled delicacy of the Savoy’s.

St Mary the Virgin, N. Stoke (Oxon): white altar frontal

Church furnishings range from serviceable to glorious, with all shades in between. A church is blessed indeed if it possesses the latter which have usually come as the  gift of a parishioner. Sadly such gifts are rarely recorded and as time goes by all parishioners who may have known the answer have died. This. I fear, is the case with the beautiful set of frontals N.Stoke church possesses.

St MAry the Virgin, N.Stoke (Oxon): central panel of white altar frontal

I think all four frontals are about 100 years old and may well have been given by Sir John Wormald, Lord of the Manor and High Sheriff of Oxfordshire who lived in The Springs (now a hotel)  just outside the village and was a noted village benefactor, funding both the charming Arts and Crafts Village Hall (1911) and a cricket pitch (since ploughed up).

St MAry the Virgin, N.Stoke (Oxon): detail of rose from central panel of white altar frontal

Regular in his attendance at church, he expected no less from those who worked for him and, once ensconced  with his family in the front pew, he would make a conspicuous show of turning round and scanning the assembled congregation to see who of his workers were missing. He sounds just the sort of chap who’d like churchgoers to look at a fine set of church furnishings and just the sort of man who’d go out and find the best.

St MAry the Virgin, N.Stoke (Oxon): central panel of white altar frontal with monogram

When I worked with the embroiderers at Christ Church, Oxford, a Bodley altar frontal was being repaired and I’ve often thought our frontals were of a similar style and were perhaps by someone who trained under him. I should ask Suellen Pedley, head of the embroiderers to have a look at ours and I hope to see her in a few weeks time and I will ask her then.

St Mary the Virgin, N.Stoke (Oxon): detail of white altar frontal

The fabric and embroideries also whisper Watts to me, so  we have sent photos to Watts and Co. of Westminster to see if they can come up with anything in their archives (incomplete as some records were destroyed during the war.) After we first got in touch with Watts and while we were taking more photographs, we came upon a label (to be shown later on the post with the purple altar frontal) on the purple frontal which suggests a different supplier of church furnishings, so Watts may not be able to help us. We are also close to St Mary the Virgin Wantage (who left the site in 2013) who had an active embroidery school but would you have gone via a showroom in London when you could have commissioned them direct. It could also be that not all our frontals came from the same source, although on that reckoning, I would say it is not the purple one with the label which stands out as being different from the others – the red velvet frontal is both of a different style and fabric.

St Mary the Virgin, N.Stoke (Oxon): detail of white altar frontal

Meanwhile, I thought I would put a different frontal on my blog each week and hope that someone with more information than we have might come across them and get in touch.

St Mary the Virgin, N.Stoke (Oxon): detail of white altar frontal

All frontals require repair work some of which is simple but most of which is complicated, especially when it concerns the couched gold threads – in some of the photographs you can see threads hanging loose and in one case you can even see the line drawn beneath where the thread once was.  This is specialist work, as some parishioners found out when they attempted a repair a few years before we came.  Fringing is often missing in places and although its replacement is a straightforward job, sourcing the fringing (and funding it if you can find it) is not. We shall have to start thinking about such things if these beautiful embroideries are going to survive and continue to be used. In the meantime, I just want to document them as they are now.