Thanks, Steve!

Some weeks ago, Steve kindly gave me a couple of old Edmonds books he'd found while cleaning out his Mum's garage. I was stoked to get these for my collection, and decided to make him something Edmonds as a thank-you.

I decided to look for a recipe that had stayed the same through the various editions, from the older versions right through to present-day Edmonds. I've accumulated enough Edmonds books by now that I was able to find the melting moments (p41) recipe in five different editions.


For whatever reason, it was a few weeks before I actually got around to making them. This past Sunday (amidst the bran muffins and fish cakes etc I was also doing) I finally rolled up my sleeves and got on to these melting moments.


The recipe is similar to a shortbread - lots of butter, creamed with icing sugar, and then cornflour, baking powder and plain flour mixed in. Once you've mixed that to a nice soft dough, the next step is to roll it into balls. The recipe says these should be 'the size of a large marble'. Possibly my memory was a bit awry as to the actual size of a large marble, since I got far more 'marbles' out of the mixture than I should have, and the final biscuits were quite tiny too. Never mind, I always like things that are bite-sized.

I laid the balls on baking trays, flattened each slightly with a floured fork, and plonked them in the oven. I think it's fair to say that my oven must be particularly hot: the cooking time is supposed to be 20 minutes, but when I checked the biscuits at 12 minutes, they were already browner than a melting moment should be. Oops - oh well, Steve wouldn't care.. or notice, probably.


Once the biscuits had cooled, I mixed up a batch of butter icing and sandwiched them together in pairs. The other option here is raspberry jam, but I've found that this can get oozy and sticky - the icing would set quickly and not make a mess.


As you'd expect, Steve was quite surprised to suddenly be presented with a container of little biscuits to thank him for something he'd done weeks ago. Of course, I didn't give them all to Steve. For a start, they didn't all fit in the container. And anyway, I had to taste some so I could write about them!

Well, they're darn good little biscuits. Since they were that little bit overdone, they were slightly drier than they should be, but still had that lovely buttery shortbready flavour. The butter icing in the centre adds a touch of sweetness, and they're small enough to be a pleasant mouthful that's not a struggle to get through. There's a reason why this recipe has held on through numerous Edmonds editions - it's clearly worth hanging on to!