Noelani is thrilled at baking her first batch of Belgium Biscuits
After making them for the first time in ages, at the request of my young American friend Noelani (who conceived a passion for them when she first came to New Zealand to study earlier this year) I remembered how very good they are when home-made. They are also more work to make than most biscuits, so I am lucky that my mother took the time and trouble to make them for us when we were young. She also used the biscuit dough part of this recipe as the basis for the gingerbread people and animals that we used to make for fund-raising fairs. After they were baked to a crisp and shapely biscuit she would ice them with a white icing, and we kids would decorate them with eyes and noses made with currants, mouths of red glace cherry slices, and sprinkles of hundreds and thousands.
In hunting out a recipe for the biscuits I went first to the Edmonds Cook Book, where they are called Belgium Biscuits, and then to Alexa Johnston's Ladies a Plate Traditional Home Baking, where they are called Belgian Biscuits. I knew that the name had been changed from German biscuits during World War I, in an outbreak of patriotic nominal lunacy, so hoping to find which was the original or correct name, I consulted David Veart's story of New Zealand cooking, First Catch Your Weka. On p. 225 he says that German biscuits became Belgium biscuits in honour of the 'brave little Belgium' of Allied propaganda. He then gives a recipe supplied by a Miss Baigent to the Town and Country Patriotic Women Workers Cookery Book, which was published in Palmerston North in 1917.
This recipe is not the same as the one which Johnston obtained from the 1945 edition of the Women's Institute Home Cookery Book, where it is called Belgian Biscuits. The change from noun to adjective may be more euphonious (and more in line with the original name, which was German not Germany biscuits) but now that I know what the original name was and why it was given I think I will stick with that one.
Baigent's 1917 recipe had ground rice as well as flour, a phenomenal amount of butter (1 and 1/4 lb), much less spice, no cocoa, and brown sugar is not specified for the sugar measure. The Women's Institute and Edmond's recipes have all the same ingredients, with the Women's Institute one having more butter and sugar. Noelani and I made that recipe, with the minor alteration of less cocoa, pure white icing, and a hundreds and thousands topping.
These are very sociable biscuits to make, with lots of opportunities for working together rolling and cutting the dough, sandwiching the baked biscuits together with jam, and icing and decorating the tops. Good fun for friends, partners or parents and children to do together and keep this Kiwi classic going for another century.
Noelani cuts up butter and Christine adds the weighed measure
of brown sugar to the mixing bowl.
BELGIUM BISCUITS
Ingredients
1. Biscuits
225g butter
225 g brown sugar
1 egg
2 cups flour
2 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
2. Filling
raspberry jam
3. Icing
2 cups icing sugar
2 tbsp lemon juice
red glace cherries; hundreds and thousands
Method
Cream the softened butter and the sugar until pale. Beat in the egg.
Add the sifted dry ingredients and mix to form a soft dough.
Cover the dough and chill it in the fridge for 2 hours, or overnight.
When ready to bake the biscuits, preheat the oven to 180 degrees C and grease two baking trays with butter.
Divide the dough in half, return one half to the fridge and knead the other half on a floured board until it is malleable enough to roll out.
Roll it out on a lightly-floured bench or board until it is 3 mm thick, and cut it into circles about 5 cm wide. (If you don't have a cutter this wide, use a glass or tea cup which is the right size.)
Repeat with the second measure of dough, putting the circles on the greased trays as you work, until all the dough is used up.
Bake the biscuits for 10-12 minutes, rotating the trays halfway through, until they are firm on top, a little brown underneath, and giving off a spicy baked smell.
Cool the biscuits on a wire rack while you make the icing by sifting the icing sugar into a bowl and mixing it with the lemon juice and a little hot water (add slowly) to make a spreadable mix. If you are topping the biscuits with glace cherries, cut them in half.
When the biscuits are cold, ice half of them and decorate them with cherries or a sprinkling of hundreds and thousands.
When then icing has set, spread the non-iced biscuits with raspberry jam, and sandwich pairs of biscuits together.
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