Time for a third (and final) revision in the series! After the disappointing results of my previous attempt, I revised the recipe a bit, removing the milk powder and adding a little milk to give the baking powder somewhere to react, and adding even more butteriness:
175g white flour
50g white sugar
25g dark Muscovado sugar
60g oats (porridge, not jumbo)
125g butter
50g golden syrup
10ml milk
2tsp baking powder (actually an 11g “Alsa” sachet)
Pinch of salt
2tsp of butter flavouring
1/4tsp vanilla powder
A small bowl of Demerara sugar (cassonade in France) for rolling
Instructions are unchanged, apart from adding the milk. I dropped the oven temperature to 140°C and found that they needed baking for about 35 mins, much longer than the earlier attempts. They came out nice and crunchy, though I managed to forget to roll them in the Demerara; I couldn’t figure out why they were hard to flatten as they stuck to the spatula so much, which the Demerara prevents. Duh.
Anyway, these came out pretty well, and I’m happy enough with the recipe at this point.
A while ago I wrote up my attempt at making a copy of Fox’s butter crinkle crunch biscuits, which are no longer available to buy. In that article I mentioned various things I thought I’d try, and others commented with some suggestions, so I thought I’d revisit the recipe.
Since then I have obtained some “Uncle Roy’s” butter flavouring (triacetin). I found that the recommended 5–6 drops did nothing, but I got a reasonable amount of butteriness with about 60 drops (about 1.5 tsp)! Unfortunately the carrier solvent for this flavouring (Monopropylene Glycol) tastes quite harsh and bitter, and a hint of it remained in the end product. Uncle Roy’s offers a “super strength” version of this flavouring that might reduce this effect.
The other suggestions were to reduce the amount of sugar, add more oats, and to add milk powder. There was also a suggestion to use ammonium bicarbonate as the raising agent, but I couldn’t find that.
Unfortunately, putting all these together didn’t work very well. The dough ended up quite dry, though sticky enough to hold together. I think this prevented the raising agent from working properly, as they remained stubbornly flat while cooking, so I think adding some liquid (perhaps a bit of water or milk) or increasing the butter a bit, would help give the baking powder somewhere to react. This drying might have been an effect of adding the milk powder and increasing oats.
Not quite butter crinkle crunches
While I say “unfortunately”, they are still quite nice (I mean, just look at the ingredients!). I think next time I’ll lower the temperature and cook them a bit longer to give more chance for the solvents to boil off, and the raising agent to do its thing, aiming for a more consistent crunchy texture.
Just for reference (as I don’t recommend following this exactly!), here is a revised ingredients list; the instructions remain unchanged from before:
175g white flour
50g white sugar
25g dark muscovado sugar (adds a slightly caramel-y taste)
60g oats (porridge, not jumbo)
50g milk powder
125g butter
50g golden syrup
2tsp baking powder
Pinch of salt
1.5tsp of butter flavouring
1/4tsp vanilla powder
A small bowl of Demerara sugar (cassonade in France) for rolling
If you have a go at these, please leave a comment, as I’d love to know if you manage to do any better!
