You will be able to whip up a batch of biscuits – and have washed up – in under half an hour
I needed a quick and easy recipe to rustle up some festive treats for a local fundraiser and who better to turn to than Mary Berry? National baking treasure Mary, 90, can always be relied on to come up with the goods – I own a number of her books – and a recipe of hers published over 30 years ago, that I’d actually never tried before, fit the bill perfectly.
Taken from Mary Berry’s Ultimate Cake Book, released in 1994, Fork Biscuits were under the “bazaars and fetes” heading. They are made with just three ingredients and are ready in 15 to 20 minutes – ideal if you don’t have heaps of time to spend in the kitchen this Christmas time.
Mary is an advocate of “straight from the fridge” baking spread in a lot of her cakes, and I chose to use this (though her recipe suggests softened butter for a “more delicious biscuit”). There were just two other ingredients, caster sugar and self-raising flour.
It was simply a matter of beating the spread and sugar together, mixing in the flour and then working it into a dough with your hands. There was no resting it in the fridge or anything.
I found the mix a bit crumbly at first as I started to work it into a dough, but it soon came together; then it was a case of rolling it into walnut-sized pieces. Mary said the recipe should make about 16 biscuits, so I erred on the side of caution and roughly cut my dough “ball” in half, in half again, and so on until I had 16 pieces to roll.
These were spaced on a baking tray and, as the name of the biscuit suggests, a fork dipped in water was used to flatten the dough balls – and give them their distinctive markings. While they baked, I had time to wash up.
The biscuits were the requisite “pale golden” shade in 20 minutes. After getting them out of the oven, I left them a couple of minutes before transferring the biscuits to a wire rack to cool.
The resulting biscuits were crisp and tasty, and not flimsy, which was ideal for me as I was packing them into some Christmassy treat bags and didn’t want them to crumble. I was so taken with the first lot of biscuits that I went on to bake a batch of Mary’s Chocolate Fork Biscuits (the only extra ingredient being half-an-ounce of cocoa in place of the same amount of flour).
For this recipe Mary does include soft margarine rather than butter. The chocolate version was even easier to roll and the biscuits baked like a dream – Mary says you can make lemon or orange versions of Fork Biscuits by adding the grated rind of a lemon or a small orange to the basic mix, and I think these would be nice and festive, too.
You could get the kids involved in all the stages of weighing out, mixing and rolling the dough and making the fork imprint on them. They could soon share in the results of their labours as well, with these being such a quick bake.
Find the recipe that Mary Berry says she has been making herself “for years”, below.
Fork Biscuits – makes about 16 biscuits
Ingredients
4oz/100g butter, softened (or soft margarine)
2oz/50g caster sugar
5oz/150g self-raising flour
Method
Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. Lightly grease two baking trays.
Measure the butter into a bowl and beat with a wooden spoon. Gradually beat in the sugar then mix in the flour. Bring the mixture together with your hands to form a dough.
Form the dough into walnut-sized balls and space well apart on the baking trays. Dip a fork into a little water and use this to flatten the biscuits.
Bake for about 15 to 20 minutes until a very pale golden. Lift of the baking tray and leave to cool completely on a wire rack.