[Recipe] Regency Spiced Biscuits

Our beloved Auntie Beeb recently broadcast a beautiful documentary about the planning and full reconstitution of a Regency ball: Pride and Prejudice: Having a Ball.

I love Jane Austen, dancing, costumes and cooking and baking, so that was more than a treat.

At the end of the documentary, we were informed that more information could be found on their page on the BBC website, and I clicked there.

I discovered three extra clips... and one was about Regency spiced biscuits.

If you have access to the videos on that website, hop there:

 

because Mr Ivan Day's explanations are better than what I'm going to do here, but... it's so cool and so good that I've decided to put the recipe here to share with the world.

You'll need:

125 gr plain white flour

125 gr blanched almonds

40 gr icing sugar

a teaspoon each: powdered mace (or mixed spice) and powdered cinnamon

~~~~~~

100 ml water

125 gr caster sugar

First, put together flour, almonds, icing sugar and spices in a mixing bowl and blend them together.

Then, put the water in a small pan and boil it; add the sugar and swirl it around until every crystal melts. Keep it boiling for about one minute: you'll have a sugar syrup.

Stir the syrup into the mixture, a bit at a time (this is extremely important!) [Read: I didn't do it, and my mixture was momentarily messy].

Once all the syrup is in, your dough should look a tad like a big, wet crumble. When it's cool enough to handle, put it together in a big ball that you'll put into the shape of a small rolling pin. Once you've done that, flatten it and place it on a papered baking tray.

Put the tray into the oven (160°C) for about 40 minutes. [Tip: keep an eye on it in the last minutes - mine was almost too baked in the last four minutes]

Slice the giant biscuit diagonally with the sharpest and biggest knife you've got; cut the thinnest slices you can.
Place them back onto a tray (or some paper, which was what I did) and back into the oven (switched off and cooled down) to dry out: biscuit is Latin for cooked twice.

They look great in a tin box:

Now, for the love of your teeth, dunk! In dessert wine, in coffee, in tea... in water or... whatever, but if you don't want to mourn a molar, do dunk.
They may be a lot thinner than croquets from Provence, but they're fierce - and absolutely delicious (and I usually hate cinnamon, which says a lot about these lovely biscuits!)