Our Halloween posts have been going down a (trick or) treat and whilst away in Ireland at the weekend I took advantage of a rainy day to ‘ borrow’ my friend’s daughter, Lucy, to have a go at some Frankensteins Finger biscuits I had seen on Pinterest.
Well, that was the plan. The day turned out to be gloriously sunny in Courtmacsherry and the views over the bay were stunning, but being a true martyr to the cause we stayed in to create delicious treats for you. We also didn’t have a recipe, or much in the cupboard.
I googled a biscuit recipe that kind of fitted the biscuit brief, and because gluten free is all the rage we decided to substitute almond flour for plain flour, and we didn’t have very much of that anyway… except that we didn’t have any so used ground almonds instead. The recipe didn’t say how many cookies it made… this was also a mistake, because it made a lot… an awful lot.
So, I am not going to bore you with the recipe details, because they will just ensure you have the same issues that we did. Firstly, ground almonds do not absorb the liquid ingredients as well as flour does… so after adding two eggs we had to add what plain flour we could to make something vaguely resembling a dough… you can see where the quantity thing started to become as issue.
Anyway, we had fun mixing all the dry ingredients, creaming margarine and granulated sugar (no caster available), curdling the mixture with the addition of eggs and then bunging in all the dry… and then adding some flour to it, and a bit more, and a bit more and a bit more… Lucy beat the mixture like a demon and then the best bit… added the green food colouring.
At this point we realised we didn’t have any almonds for finger nails, so we raided the museli packet for some (about 10) which we soaked in red food colouring. We debated whether to put the nails on before baking, half way through or at the end. We then looked at how much green gunge we had a decided we could try all three approaches. Batch one was for colour testing. They were a little pale but tasted good. We ate the lot.
After the addition of much more green batch two batch two went into the oven. The colour was better but at no point did the insertion of almond nails seem quite right. Lucy had totally lost interest at this point, although she had done a great job of tidying up and wiping down the surfaces (we left the floor to Molly the dog!).
The almond nails were precious I left them off again and just painted the food colouring on the ends of the biscuits.
Batch three saw me putting the red almond nails in before baking. This was great, but the mixture was still spreading wildly across the baking tray… very fat fingers. We were sure they would taste fine and we trimmed them to size whilst warm.
Batch four was to try and use up some more mixture. Starting to fret about what to do with over 50 green biscuits…
Batch five and I just out what was left of the mix on a baking tray and stuck it in the oven… to make a big biscuity cake thing. We all felt a little queasy and had no intention of eating another green biscuit as long as we live.
