Homemade Hobnobs

In an episode of the Vicar of Dibley, Geraldine (the vicar) asks Owen to help her unload groceries from her car, and offers him eternal salvation in return. To paraphrase the rest:

Owen: Got anything.....more unnebulous?
Vicar: Chocolate Hobnobs?
Owen: Let's do it!

I've enjoyed McVitie's Digestives before, but when I was in the British food section of Hiller's market a week ago, I decided to try another McVitie's cookie: Hobnobs (the plain ones, not the chocolate ones). They had a lot of oats and whole wheat and nothing too terrible in them.

And they were delicious. Crispy, "grain-y" (by which I mean the flavor of the oats and wheat were prominent), substantial and satisfying.

I should make my own, I thought.

But, of course, when I googled "homemade Hobnobs," someone else (well, scores of other people) had beaten me to it. So no points for an original idea, but it does mean I have a couple recipes for Hobnobs at my disposal! And I found neat-o blogs in the process. Here are links to the recipes from Cookie Madness (cool blog!) and from La Recette du Jour (be sure to read Judy's comments under the blog post--pretty interesting).

Sweet Potato and Pecan Pancakes

Thur. eve., 2/4/10, 9:30

Sometimes, you just want a pancake. You don’t want the organic turnip greens sautéed with chopped garlic and Italian-sausage-style seitan over artisanal organic whole wheat pasta blah blah blah. You just want to sit on your rear in front of the TV, watching the BBC drama from Netflix (Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now), holding on your lap a plate of bready, ghee-slathered, syrup-soaked pancakes and drinking a cup of tea. For dinner. In your pajamas.

So that’s what I did. Sure, the whole process took longer than the braised-turnip-green rigamarole, because I decided they should be sweet potato pancakes with pecans (why do I make things complicated?), and the kitchen was full of dirty dishes that had to be washed before I could even start cooking, and now I’m here typing this instead of watching my BBC corset drama, but were they delicious? Yes, they were.

Drawing on proportions from my favorite pancake recipe, which I carry around in my head like a Bee Gees tune, I mixed up some flax meal, spelt and whole wheat flours, powdered buttermilk, baking soda, kosher salt, coarsely chopped (OK—“hand-squished,” if you must know) pecans, cinnamon, nutmeg, and (my new favorite spice) cloves in one bowl, and a glob of mashed boiled sweet potato, two eggs, and expired sour cream thinned with water (always save the turned dairy for pancakes or muffins—this probably breaks a rule of ayurveda) in the other. Added the dry to the wet ingredients.

I put the heat diffuser (from the Vermont Country Store) over my gas burner, and my grandma Rita’s cast-iron skillet over that. When drops of water danced on it, I knew (as Rita had instructed me) that the skillet was the right temperature.

The rest was the typical pancake waiting game: pick a done one up and eat it plain while you’re waiting for the next batch to brown, pace the kitchen with a pancake turner in hand, take a sip of tea, step out of the kitchen and stare at the TV (whose screen does not yet show the BBC drama), realize, 14 pancakes later, that some will need to be frozen, perk up at the prospect of having frozen pancakes handy.

Enough of this!—I’m going to fit in an hour of 19th-century drama before bed.