My quest for palm-oil free biscuits is currently in the ‘home-made’ phase. Yesterday I trialled two recipes – one for oat biscuits and one for digestives.

Oat crunchies

Oat Crunchies. I found this recipe for very easy oat biscuits in an old Delia Smith cookery book using very simple ingredients – jumbo oats, porridge oats, demerara sugar and margarine. I don’t eat margarine, so I substituted butter. There were tasty, but there was far too much fat in them – on reflection, butter is almost 100% fat, whilst margarine contains a high proportion of water, so I should have cut down the quantity. They are very easy and I do like the flavour, so I will make them again and modify the recipe. Once I’ve got it right, I will share it with you.

Chocolate freshly applied

Chocolate digestives. Now this is my real target, and this was my first try. I found an article on The Guardian website entitled How to Cook the Perfect Digestive Biscuit by Felicity Cloake. How promising is that? There’s quite a lot of discussion about ingredients and the reasons for including them so I decided to give her recipe a try. Unfortunately I couldn’t get hold of any medium oatmeal locally, so I ended up using ‘fine’ instead, which may have altered the texture a little. The general consensus is that these have the right sort of flavour, but they are not crunchy enough and have a slightly stodgy texture. I think rolling them out a bit thinner would help and I will do this next time. It is certainly a promising start and I have high hopes for future success.