Delia describes her chocolate and almond crunchies as “a very good place to start if you are a beginner in home baking”, and this is true. Once you have made these biscuits, you can easily and happily adapt the recipe to an almost infinite extent.
The recipe is so easy and so intuitive that you will quickly move from following Delia’s instructions to experimenting and making new crunchies of your own.
But I also have bad news:
the original recipe itself tastes a bit like an experiment gone wrong. There is simply too much going on: it includes chocolate, butter, sugar, golden syrup and almonds. It’s what would happen if you let a small child list their favourite ingredients and then you made them into a biscuit with no thought as to the results. (The favourite ingredients that is, not the small child.)
It’s not bad as such, but you can’t escape from the sense that you could have made a tastier biscuit with just butter, golden syrup and almonds. Or just butter and chocolate.
What Delia gives us here is effectively two recipes in one – the biscuit mix, that is, the porridge oats, the butter, and the sugar – and then the added ingredients – the fruit, golden syrup, chocolate and nuts.
What you do first is put the porridge oats and half of your extra ingredient – your chocolate or your hazelnuts – in a bowl, then melt the butter, the sugar and the golden syrup, pour it in and mix it into a dough. Then use your remaining chocolate and hazelnuts for the topping, and whack it in the oven for 15 minutes.
When they come out, they will still be very soft indeed, so you will have to leave them to cool and harden for a bit before moving them on to a wire rack. On no account should you sit, watching them and prodding one occasionally. This will result in nine delicious cookies becoming one delicious pile of crumbs.
After several rounds of experimentation, I have discovered that a good crunchie has either chocolate or golden syrup in it, but not both. As the golden syrup is a vital part of the dough mixture, you will have to add a little extra butter – around 30g should do – if you leave it out.
Very gently stir it into a dough-like mixture, then use your hands to pat it until it fills the bottom of the mixing bowl – divide that into nine lumps, “the size of a large walnut”, says Delia, helpfully. If, like me, you have no idea what size that is, don’t worry – you achieve the same effect by taking out a handful of the stuff. Flatten it gently with the palm of your hand.
Because you have preheated the oven and cooked the first batch for 15 minutes, the second batch will cook around 2-3 minutes quicker than Delia suggests, depending on how quickly your oven heats up. There are two solutions here – either do the second batch for slightly shorter amounts of time, suffering your way through biscuits that are either overcooked or burnt until you work out how hot your oven gets. Or simply do the whole lot in one go, rather than in two batches, as Delia suggests.
That done, leave it all to cool, and within 20 minutes, you’ll have your own set of delicious crunchies, suited to a variety of fruits, nuts and chocolates. My broccoli and caramel crunchies are the talk of the office.
- Stephen Bush is cooking his way through Delia’s Complete How To Cook (BBC Books, £40) in a year; @stephenkb. You can watch Delia Smith’s free Online Cookery School videos at deliaonline.com; @DeliaOnline
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