Homemade crackers

I had a spare hour this afternoon - just enough time to throw together some cheese biscuits (p36). This recipe is one I've passed over time and time again, because usually when I turn to the biscuit chapter, I'm looking for something sweet.


Though these are a savoury biscuit, they still have a little sugar in them - just one tablespoon of icing sugar in amongst the other dry ingredients: flour, baking powder, salt and cayenne pepper. You sift all this together, then cut (or in my case, rub) in some butter. When it looks like breadcrumbs, you add grated cheese and enough milk to make a firm dough.


I had to use a little more milk than the three tablespoons recommended. The dough just wouldn't come together. As well as the extra milk, it took fair bit of squeezing and kneading, but I finally had a dough that was rollable.


I rolled out the dough to roughly 2mm thickness, then cut it into squares. I laid them out quite closely on a single tray and crossed my fingers that they wouldn't spread too much.


They didn't. After ten minutes in the oven, the cheese biscuits came out lightly golden, exactly as described in the recipe. I transferred them to a rack and left them to cool.


Cheese biscuits are very much like crackers, both in flavour and texture. They have that dry crumbliness that is more crackerish than biscuity, (do you like my adjectives? Spell check doesn't!) and there's a faint kick from the cayenne pepper that underlies the subtle cheesy flavour. I'm actually finding them quite moreish - I'd better control myself before I eat them all!