The peahen at work has hatched out two chicks. They were all in a huddle outside the shop this morning, and I think they may have hatched in the night. One is brown and the other duckling yellow, and they are rather sweet. The owners rounded them up after lunch and put them in a pen to keep them safe from the fox (come to that, I wouldn't trust the dog with them myself).
As it was raining yesterday afternoon I spent part of the time making some biscuits to take into work. My efforts were slightly wasted in that my male co-worker who normally does Saturdays and has an enthusiastic attitude to homemade cake had got the day off. I have observed the lunch bag of my female Saturday co-worker to contain Weight Watchers packets, and I don't think she eats real biscuits. One of the co-owners of the business was covering for the holiday absence, and had a biscuit and said that it was very good. The ones I ate tasted fine to me.
It was a pleasant day, but not a lot happened to write about, apart from some sharp downpours and the peachicks, so here is the biscuit recipe. It is from my mother's edition of The Good Housekeeper's Cookery Book, and I have used it since I was about twelve.
Rub four and a half ounces (I have no idea why the odd half) of butter into twelve ounces of self-raising flour. Stir in six ounces of caster sugar. Mix to a softish dough with milk (the difference between too crumbly and too wet seems to be about a teaspoon of liquid). Roll out on a floured board. Cut into circles (about 3 inches diameter). Put a dab of jam in the middle of each circle. Pull up the edges into little pasty shaped parcels. Cook on a greased tray at 400 degrees fahrenheit. This equates to 200 C or gas mark 6. I don't use fahrenheit myself, or indeed gas marks, as we don't have gas. In fact as we have an Aga I don't get more precise than hot, not very hot, or below boiling. I don't think these biscuits are that fussy. They took around half an hour at fairly hot, and I checked on them a few times while they were in the oven, just in case.
They splodge out during cooking. As originally given the recipe uses raspberry jam, which is very nice, but I didn't have any. I have used blackcurrant jelly in the past which is good but not as good as the raspberry, not quite chiming with the biscuit flavour. Today I used rosehip jelly, because I had a couple of jars left from 2008 which looked perfectly fine, but you can't really give people three year old jam as a present. The rosehip jelly worked very well, and I suspect that apricot would be good. You could probably substitute a little ground almond for some of the flour, if you had any sculling around that wanted using up.
The instinctive approach to cooking doesn't always work. I tried to make some egg custard the other day, to eat for breakfast with stewed blackcurrants (of which we had developed a mountain in the freezer going back to 2008, but I don't believe frozen fruit can go off). The custard didn't set, so I added another egg, but it remained extremely runny. I redesignated it egg soup, and it tasted very nice with the blackcurrants (they are terribly fierce by themselves and need yoghurt or something with them. I thought of the custard because we had rather a lot of eggs). But it looked silly. I couldn't feed egg soup to guests.
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