Prune, Banana and Oat Cookie Biscuits

I’ve made a lot of biscuits in the last year or so. Sidney eats a lot of fruit for his snacks, but you can’t beat a biscuit for satisfying little tummies, and they don’t have to be sugar-laden – there are plenty of healthy biscuit recipes out there. Often I cut the quantity of sugar in recipes by half or even less. I just don’t think everything has to be so sweet all the time and fortunately the taste buds of my family agree.

The great thing about biscuits, apart from their simplicity, is that you can often make up a dough and freeze half to bake another time. Batch cooking saved me a lot of time when Sidney was very small and meant I almost always had something in the freezer for emergencies. They’re also really handy for days out, and I usually bake a batch to take on holiday, or if we visit Sidney’s grandparents in France, so that I know he’s got healthy snacks if we’re on the move.

My go-to book for biscuit recipes is Miranda Gore Browne’s Biscuit. It has a range of recipes for grown-ups and little people, and Miranda bakes for her own children, so the sugar quantities aren’t crazy and there are lots of relatively healthy recipes in there.

Miranda appeared in the second series of Bake Off and I haven’t baked a dud recipe from her book yet. Some of my favourites include the Marmite Morsels, which are made with wholemeal flour, cheese and Marmite, and which were probably the first biscuits I started making for Sidney; the Honey Oatcakes, made with wholemeal flour and oats; my current favourites, the Seriously Seedy Biscuits, which I made with pumpkin, sunflower, chia and sesame seeds and which make the most delicious, light crispy biscuits; the Elegant Pistachio Puffs, which the French in-laws loved so much they took the recipe back to France with them; and the super handy Honey Biscuits, which are so simple and quick to cook from store cupboard ingredients you can have light, crumbly honey biscuits whipped up and baked in 15 minutes.

Sometimes, however, you just want to whip something up with what you have to hand. This recipe was inspired by a packet of prunes I’d bought for Sidney that had somehow been contaminated and were covered in mould. I cleaned off all the mould and figured they’d be fine to eat (I watched a BBC programme recently that said mould on fruit will pretty much never do you any great harm, and I would rather clean off mould rather than waste good food whenever possible), but I was still a bit nervous about giving it to Sidney, so I thought I’d bake it into a biscuit.

The thing to remember about making up recipes is that if you stick to the general ratios, you’ll rarely go too far wrong. The standard ratio for a biscuit is 1:1:1, or 1-part flour, 1-part fat, 1-part sugar. For a cookie it’s 3:2:1, or 3-parts flour, 2-parts fat, 1 part sugar. Vary the ratios and you’ll get a slightly different texture, or flavour.

These are more like chewy cookies than crisp biscuits. I used bananas because, again, I had them to hand. If you’ve got more bananas you’ll get a gooier dough, so cook the biscuits on a lower heat for longer to help them dry out. The dry ingredients are oats, ground almonds and desiccated coconut, which also adds to the sweetness along with the fruit. The good thing about chewy biscuits for toddlers, especially young ones, is that they tend to hold together during the eating. You might get half a crumbly biscuit into the mouth of a small person, the other half left in a trail of crumbs from the kitchen, through the living room and out into the garden (Sidney likes to eat on the move). Keep it a little bit sticky and you’ve got a much better chance of getting it into their bellies.

Here’s my very simple recipe.

Prune, Banana and Oat Cookie Biscuits

Makes about 16

2 ripe bananas (about 150g)

100g prunes

100g oats

50g ground almonds

50g desiccated coconut

¼ tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 180°C/ 160°C fan/gas 4. Line 2 baking sheets with silicone mats or baking paper.

Put all your ingredients into a bowl and mix together with a wooden spoon. Roll up teaspoonfuls of the mixture into balls, then space them out on the lined baking sheets and press down with your fingers until they’re about 5mm thick. They can be a little thicker, but they’re quite wet, so you want them thin enough to dry out in the oven.

Bake for about 25 minutes, checking them after 20 minutes or so to make sure they’re not catching at the edges. If you want dryer biscuits, just leave them in a little longer. They should be nice and brown once they’re cooked, with a slight crunch on the top. Transfer to a wire rack to cool and store in an airtight container.

 

Miranda Gore Browne blogs here. Biscuit is published by Ebury Press.